Outside Morley’s
As all Americans arrive in London with sea-legs after a week of ship’s cooking, it is doubly necessary to have been there before in order to know where to go at once for an on-shore dinner and good rooms. But before you arrive at either of these you once more become a part of the city and again feel perfectly at home, as you look from your cab window at theatrical lithographs to find out what is going on for that night; and no transformation scene on the stage is more complete than your own, from standing in the companion-way waiting for the ship’s run to be posted, to a few hours later sitting in a London theatre watching the stage rock from side to side.
I believe an American enjoys London more during his second visit. He is sure to be older for one thing, and with very little left of the prejudice he once had. He is not so apt to wear a sensitive patriotic chip on his shoulder, and for this reason he will give London a better opportunity to know him. If it is your second visit you have the pleasure of recognizing familiar types and places. Your hotel porter may remember you, and there may be one or two of the old waiters still left in the dining-room. Nelson’s Column and the National Gallery are former friends; also the recruiting sergeants, among them Sergeant Charley, the best known of all. He has stood at the corner of the National Gallery for many years, and has probably talked more country boys into Her Majesty’s service, consoled more weeping mothers, and cheered more disappointed maidens than any other man in the British army. There is no better place in which Sergeant Charley can operate than Trafalgar Square—or from which the stranger can begin London.
Between Times, Leicester Square
On Bond Street
The bewildering scene always reminds me of the art student I once saw painting it from the steps of the gallery; and I thought then that if the actors on the great stage in front of her could have seen the hopeless condition of her canvas and her pale, worried face they might have stood still for awhile. But the panorama has never stopped, and the only quiet figures in Trafalgar Square are its bronze statues. There you will see country boys looking, with admiring envy, at the smart uniforms of the soldiers, and with terror at the dingy army of sandwich-men shuffling through the gutter carrying advertisements of hot and cold luncheons, Turkish baths, manicure parlors, and places of amusement, serving, at the same time, as awful examples of what will happen to all those who do not take the sergeant’s advice and become soldiers. Even some of the street beggars are familiar. “The old rat-man” and his pets find Brighton too dull in the winter, and come up to London for the season, to mix once more in its streets, where all kinds of horses are driven by as great a variety of men, from the pedler to the powdered-wigged coachman. Cable-cars and trolleys would be sadly out of place in London, and horseless carriages would be a calamity. There should be no need to go faster than a horse can trot, and the best way of all is to walk.