'All is dark,' he thought, 'all is dark. This is my second vigil within a few days. My second vigil. All is dark. I suppose Marie is sleeping still. The city is slowly waking. I can hear the mutter of traffic, but I can see nothing, for all is dark. 'I wonder where the song is Marie sung last night? Quenched in this dense darkness. How strange to stand here and listen to the waking notes of this vast city! Gog and Magog are turning in their dreams. What a wonderful city this is! Its wakening cries are louder than the noonday voice of Stratford; but I miss the delicate tones of the river. 'The birds are still sleeping in the trees around our house at Stratford, and mother and Alice are sleeping too. In Stratford now you could not hear a sound but the soft secret lispings of the Avon. An hour before the dawn a river speaks as at no other time of day or night. Often in coming home from fishing I have stood to listen to the river beginning to speak. The first voice after sunset does not come from near where you stand, but from round a bend or some part you are not looking at. You think it is a late bird until you weigh the sound in your ear, and then you find no bird could touch so delicate a note, reach so weird a meaning. Then all at once a hundred soft whispers steal along the shore and from the surface of the stream, and you wait and listen minute after minute in the hope or fear the whisperings will shape themselves in some human speech. You wait until disappointment yields to despair. Then you turn to go. You have taken only one step, when you hear the river saying distinctly, "Stay, stay." You remain immoveable for awhile, only to be tantalised by whisperings and mutterings less unlike human speech than before. 'I suppose a man never had a better mother or better sister than I. Nothing in the world keeps a man so clear of that most vulgar of all mental vices, cynicism, as a good mother and good sisters. It is good women who keep men in well-ordered mind. Men are not afraid of telling their weaknesses to other men, but it hurts and degrades a man when evil news of him come to ears at home. There is one sure way of making any man careless of his conduct: make his mother and sisters believe he is not what he should be. A man's wife is theoretically his equal; but in practice who ever saw this theory hold? She must govern him or he her.