London Impressions: Etchings and Pictures in Photogravure

								

flickering manner, as to the Boulevards. But in fact London Sunday is
little understood even by those who know its aspect, and the greater
number do not know even so much.

Obviously, it is one thing in the summer of livelong sunshine, and another
thing in winter. When the tops of the steeples fly a blue and white sky as
far as the eye may see--a broad flag for the streets, and a narrow,
wavering pennon for the alleys; when the reluctant faces of grey houses
are compelled by the fires of the day to bandy reflections with the grey
houses opposite; when the sun himself is lodged in every window, so that
the town multiplies his very face, and sets up suns to the west in the
morning and to the east in the evening--suns in rows, and suns that run
fluctuating along the windows of a long, unequal street; when the
plane-tree is fresh and the leaf of the elm already dry, the London
Sunday, from beginning to end, is passed by the London people out of
doors. For this reason it is difficult to understand it; you cannot tell
whither these streams of people are bound. They all have the gait of
making for some end; they do not stroll, and there is doubtless some
excursion afoot. The number of young men, in proportion to the numbers of
older men, of women, girls, and children, is curious, especially in the
further east. They go in great straggling gangs, and though they do
nothing--not even much talking--they give a false air of lawlessness to
the streaming street. They are the ugliest of all the populace, their
clothing, besides, being the most dull and indescribable, and their
bearing indefinitely defiant. The men of other kinds and ages, and the
women, who needs must balance such a horde of men of twenty, seem to
spend less of their Sunday on the road, and you may see them, accordingly,
in great numbers in the open spaces--the vague lands on the other side of
Clapton, for instance. Very few people of any kind seem to be within their
houses in the free afternoon.
In spite of the length of London, you may pass from the furthest west to
the extreme east, and from the last country field to the first, so quickly
as to get a continuous Sunday impression--the day and the people flowing,
unfolding, and closing, from suburb to remote suburb, through 'town,'
through the City, through the east, and to the verge of breathless and
unfragrant meadows, divided by a league-long tramway line lost in the
distances of Epping, whither the smoke, from which a south-west wind has
set all London radiantly free, is trailing a broken wing.
Even in the centre of the City it cannot be said that the main streets are
deserted; for they evidently are all thoroughfares towards the unknown
places to which these thousands and thousands of crossing feet are bent.
But the secondary streets are swept and vacant; and the effect of the
absence of people is to turn the whole picture pale. The asphaltic streets