But the Londoners don’t mind it. They are used to it. From the ease with which they carry umbrellas, I am convinced that they are born with them, as George Washington was with the hatchet. A Londoner never lends his umbrella, for everybody has his own, and he never loses it. It is a part of him, as much as is his nose. The umbrella should be in the coat of arms of the royal family, and I do not know but it is.
It is a dull and heavy climate. How it affects a native I cannot tell, but an American has a disposition to sleep perpetually and forever.
In the house I am in is an American, who insisted one morning on going across the square without his umbrella. I mildly remonstrated. “It is safe,” he said, “it isn’t raining now, for it was a minute ago.” He was right, but he came to grief for all that. It rained again in another minute.
London is a miracle of twistedness. If there is a straight street in it—that is, one that runs parallel with any other—I have not found it. The streets of Boston, it is said, were originally cow-paths. If those of London were located on the paths of cows, the cows must have been intoxicated, for there is no system nor any approach to one. They begin without cause and end without reason. There are angles, curves and stoppages, and that is all there is about it. Where a street, to answer the ends of convenience and economy, should go on, you come squarely against a dead wall, and where a street should naturally end, there has been constructed, at vast expense, a continuance, and for no apparent reason. Doubtless there is a reason, but I would give a handsome premium to have it made manifest to me.
Like all old cities, there never was a plan. This ground was never taken up at a dollar and a quarter an acre, as in America, by a set of speculators, and laid out in regular squares, and sold at so much a lot. London never was made—it grew. The original city is a little spot, occupied mostly by banks, but other cities grew around it, and they were joined by all sorts of lanes and roads, which in time became occupied, and so the inextricable jumble occurred.
The city is built entirely of brick and stone, and in the style and convenience of its buildings, is not to be compared to American cities. There is a terrible monotony in its architecture, and a most depressing sameness in color. All London is dingy. Occasionally an enterprising citizen paints his house to distinguish it from his neighbor’s, but he never does it but once. The coal consumed is bituminous, and the smoke it produces is the thickest smoke in the world, and it hangs very close to the earth. The paint becomes discolored in a few months, and the aspiring citizen finds in the smoke a protest against his vanity. His house soon drops into line with his neighbor’s, and is as dingy as before.
VEHICULAR.
The streets of London are crowded to a degree that an American can hardly conceive. Isaiah Rynders said once that it required more intellect to cross Broadway than it did to be a country justice. Had Isaiah stayed a week in London he would have had the conceit taken out of him. The streets of London, all of them, are boiling, seething masses of moving men and animals. Omnibusses, vast cumbrous machines, loaded full inside, and with twenty people on the top, hansoms, cabs, trucks, drays, donkey carts, pony carts, carriages, form a never-beginning and never-ending procession, making a roar like the waters of Niagara. He who attempts to cross a street has to make it a regular business. It cannot be done leisurely or in a dignified way. You narrowly escape being run down by a hansom, only to find yourself in danger of being impaled by the pole of an omnibus, and escaping that, a donkey cart is charging full at you, and if you escape a carriage, and a dozen dog carts, you finally find yourself on the sidewalk plump in the stomach of somebody, who accepts your apology with a growl.