The slow, grave notes from a church tower took command of the night. The last one faded: the old year had slipped by. And then a woman laughed—a strident, level laugh; and there swept through all the crowd a mad, feverish tremor. The women ran one to the other, kissing, wildly welcoming the New Year in; and the men, shouting thickly, snatched at them as they ran. And the cabmen touted eagerly for fares. Across the road, by a corner, a street missionary stood on a chair—an undersized, poorly clad man, with a wizened, bearded face. ... “Repent ... repent ... and save your souls to-night from the eternal torments of hell-fire.” The women jostled him, pelted him with foul gibes; and one—a young girl—broke into a peal of hysterical laughter. And I mused wonderingly on the ugliness of sin. [Sidenote: IN ST. JAMES’S PARK January 15] A sullen glow throbs overhead: golden will-o’-wisps are threading their shadowy groupings of gaunt-limbed trees; and the dull, distant rumour of feverish London waits on the still, night air. The lights of Hyde Park corner blaze like some monster, gilded constellation, shaming the dingy stars; and across the East there flares a sky-sign—a gaudy, crimson arabesque. And all the air hangs draped in the mysterious, sumptuous splendour of a murky London night.... [Sidenote: IN THE STRAND January 27] The city disgorges. All along the Strand, down the great, ebbing tide, the omnibuses, a congested press of gaudy craft, drift westwards, jostling and jamming their tall, loaded decks, with a clanking of chains, a rumble of lumbering wheels, a thudding of quick-loosed brakes, a humming of hammering hoofs.... The empty hansoms slink silently past; the street hawkers—a long row of dingy figures—line the pavement edge; troops of frenzied newsboys dart yelling through the traffic; and here and there a sullen-faced woman struggles to stem the tide of men. Somewhere, behind Pall Mall, unheeded the sun has set: the sky is powdered with crimson dust; one by one the shops gleam out, blazing their windows of burnished glass; the twilight throbs with a ceaseless shuffle of hurrying feet; and over all things hovers the spirit of London’s grim unrest. [Sidenote: SUNDAY AFTERNOON February 20] It was a little street, shabbily symmetrical—a double row of insignificant, dingy-brick houses. Muffled in the dusk of the fading winter afternoon, it seemed sunk in squalid, listless slumber. In the distance a church-bell was tolling its joyless mechanical Sunday tale.