And what a book! The restless cross-currents of its fantastic _figurantes_ flickered against the dim background of streets with cinematographic speed; and the darting limelight of his imagination would pick out by hazard, here some dark Rembrandtesque intaglio, there some half-perceived and evanescent torso, pearls from this hitherto uncharted sea which now he had to plumb with the magic theodolite of Youth, until at last all the mystery of London should stand revealed to his ardent gaze, as clear as was the mystery of that other City of his life, where, dulcet among the listening spires, hovered the plangent, reverberant bells.… And so, armed only with a copy, bound in soft dove-grey leather, of _A Wanderer in London_, Gav would sally forth from the Albany of a morning on magnificent explorations of this astounding new world that awaited his conquest, now threading its equatorial jungles, now penetrating to its uttermost poles, now standing Cortes-like on the very summit of Constitution Hill. Until now he had moved only in the circumscribed orbit of his mother’s Mayfair “set.” But now he could freely climb into the handy taxicab, or on to the humble, but oh! how instructive ’bus, and boldly drive whithersoever his daring imagination might suggest. “All the way, please, my man,” he would say to the conductors, as to the manner born, handing always a new florin. “No, keep the change.” He seldom passed unnoticed. Wood Green and Newington Butts were startled on one day by the vision of this Apollonian creature striding in his proud beauty adown their dim byways; next day it was the turn of Tulse Hill and Hornsey Rise to know a second dawn, and then perhaps a sudden light brightened the lives of the obscure denizens of Poultry. His keen eye soon noticed that ’busses had numbers. “Really? Really? Is that so?” Uncle Wilkie had asked incredulously as they sat together in the Albany waiting to see in the New, and, as it turned out, so eventful, Year.[7] [7] This would make the exact date of this interesting incident December 31st. (LIT. EXEC.) “Yes, isn’t it quaint?” nodded Gaveston. “And to-morrow I’m going to take a Number 1, and the day after that a Number 2, and so on till I really know my London.” And the old rake roared at the lad’s witty caracoling. One evening, too, when Gaveston, a trifle tired but still alert in every faculty, came back from one of these marvellous expeditions, his uncle greeted him in the Albany colonnade. “I can’t believe it. I can’t. It’s beyond belief, m’ boy!” “What can _that_ be, uncle?” asked Gaveston with smiling calm. “Is it true what they’re saying in the clubs to-day, that you’ve been across every single bridge in London?” “Quite true,” he replied, with deprecating modesty. “And through the Rotherhithe Tunnel, too,” he added quietly.