The first few times I visited it I found it bewildering, but after I had learned to look upon it as a local habitation and a name, I learned to love it.
By day or by night, it is a great, crazy, beautiful whirl. Everybody in it is trying to get out of it, and everybody out is trying to get in. This causes a merry game of odds, and the elegant policemen send glances of mild reproof after the newsboys who hurtle through the crowd, yelling “Dily Mile!”
The rush of traffic here is considered a sure road to battle, murder, or sudden death, and the Londoner who crosses Piccadilly Circus rarely expects to get through alive.
But to me London traffic seems child’s play compared to ours in New York. I sauntered safely through Piccadilly Circus, without one tenth part of the trepidation that always seizes me when I try to scurry across Broadway. The lumbering ’buses have no such desire to run over people, as that which burns in the hearts of our trolley-cars. The pedestrians are too deliberate of speed, and the traffic too gentle of motion, to inspire fear of jostlement.
Dawdling along, I paused to look in at Swan and Edgar’s windows. Rather, I attempted to look in; for, with a peculiar sort of short-sightedness, these drapers choose to be-plaster their window panes with large posters which comment favorably upon the wares that are presumably behind them, but which cannot be seen by peeping through the small spaces left between the posters.
Then across to the Criterion for tea. All of the great restaurants present a gay scene at tea hour, and the Criterion, with its “decorative painting by eminent artists,” and its crowds of guests both eminent and decorative is among the gayest.
But it is a gayety of correct and subdued tone. The ladies, in their flashing finery of raiment, are of a cool, reserved deportment, and the men drink their tea and munch sweet cakes with a gravity born of the seriousness of the occasion.
If one notices any conspicuous action or effect in a London restaurant, one may be sure it is perpetrated by a stranger,—probably a visiting American.
I recently saw in one of our finest Fifth Avenue restaurants a most attractive young woman, who came in accompanied by a well-set-up, and moreover an exceedingly sensible looking, young man.
With absolute savoir faire, and no trace of self-consciousness, the girl carried in her arm a large brown “Teddy bear.”