But now we can proceed with our journey to that far city that lies so slumberously on the breast of the Adriatic.
If you live in Fetter Lane, these are your instructions. Walk straight up the Lane into Holborn; take your first turning on the left and continue directly through Oxford Street and Bayswater, until you reach Victoria Gate in the Park railings. This you enter. This is the very portal of the way.
'Twas precisely this direction taken by John Grey on that Friday morning in April, in such a year as history seems reticent to afford.
There is a means of travelling in London, you know, which is not exactly in accordance with the strict principles of honesty, since it is worked on the basis of false pretences; and if a hero of a modern day romance should stoop to employ it as a means of helping him on his journey to the City of Beautiful Nonsense, he must, on two grounds, be excused. The first ground is, that he has but a penny in his pocket, which is needed for the chair in Kensington Gardens; the second, that most human of all excuses which allows that, when Circumstance drives, a man may live by his wits, so long as he takes the risk of the whipping.
This, then, is the method, invented by John Grey in an inspired moment of poverty. There may be hundreds of others catching inspiration from the little street arabs, who have invented it too. Most probably there are, and they may be the very first to exclaim against the flippant treatment of so dishonest a practice. However that may be, out of his own wits John Grey conceived this felonious means of inexpensive travelling--absolutely the most inexpensive I ever knew.
You are going from Holborn to Victoria Gate in the Park railings--very well. You must mount the first 'bus which you see going in the direction you require; grasp the railings--and mount slowly to the top, having first ascertained that the conductor himself is on the roof. By the time you have reached the seat upstairs, if you have done it in a masterly and approved-of fashion, the 'bus has travelled at least twenty yards or so. Then, seeing the conductor, you ask him politely if his 'bus goes in a direction, which you are confident it does not. This, for example, is the conversation that will take place.
"Do you go to Paddington Station?"
"No, sir, we don't; we go straight to Shepherd's Bush."
"But I thought these green 'busses went to Paddington?"
"There are green 'busses as does, but we don't."