"Making sketches in war time is very different, by the way, from making sketches in time of peace. It is a business full of possibilities, when all manner of spy suspicions are afloat. I made up my mind to do a sketch of the Royal Exchange. Not as I should have done it a year before, mind you, nor even three months before, but now, with the thought of bomb-dropping Zeppelins in the back of my mind. It occurred to me when I was hurrying along one rainy evening in a taxi past the Stock Exchange, the Globe Insurance, the Bank of England. Everywhere cabs drawn up along the curbing, cabs slipping past, people, great moving crowds of people with their umbrellas up, moving off down Threadneedle and Victoria. "A lot of human life and some very beautiful architecture and a good part of the world's business, all concentrated here. And I thought to myself what might happen should the cultured Germans get as far as London, and should the defenders of the world's civilization drop a bomb down into the heart of things here. I pictured to myself what havoc could be wrought. "And I thought, too, of places like Southwark. Ever been in Southwark? Horrible. A year before, when I was making the sketches for my Dickens book, I spent a great deal of time in the Southwark section. Now, with the prospect of Zeppelins, I thought again of Southwark. A bomb in a Southwark street! Good Lord, can you imagine the horror of it! There fifty or sixty families are packed into a single tenement, and the houses in their turn are packed one against the next along streets so narrow that the buildings seem to be nodding to each other, touching foreheads almost. Desperately poor people, children swarming every moment of the day and night up and down these dark stairways, up and down these hideously dark streets. Now drop a bomb in the midst of it all. That is what Englishmen are thinking of now. "I didn't go over into Southwark; I couldn't stand it. The next day I went back to the Stock Exchange to make my sketch. I've done sketches in London before--every nook and cranny of it--but this time I felt a little nervous when I got there with my umbrella and my little tools. But I managed it. I said to the bobby, I said--" And then Mr. Smith, getting up from his chair and relapsing into the frown that always means he is going to tell a story, showed how he managed it. It is impossible to reproduce Mr. Smith's inimitable manner. "'Are you, now?' said I. "'Well, 'ow can I tell?' said he. "'But if you're the excellent English bobby that I believe you to be,' said I, 'you'll see at once that I'm an honest American artist just here to do a little sketching.' "'I tell you,' said he. W'y don't you just pop hup and see 'Is Lordship the Mayor?'