What an outlook greets us this dull November day! Misty bricks and mortar emerge and disappear like swiftly buried cities. Hazy, indefinite, dubious figures loom upon us out of the darkness, like ancestral ghosts; dull thuds, faint cries, strange stampings and gratings are transmitted to our ears with telephonic minuteness; and all the while our throats are aching, our eyes are streaming, our noses are smarting, the motor bus is useless, and—we don’t know where we are.
Perhaps in all the gamut of human sensibility there can be no more creepy sensation than that of being lost in familiar surroundings. The ruler of Hades himself, or Jupiter with his thunderbolts, could not invent a more refined torture than that consummated in the paradox: “Here I am!—Where am I?” Yet, how ordinary has this impression become to the dweller in London.
“Here, boy! can you tell me where I am? I thought I was near the South Kensington Station, but—I begin to be horribly puzzled. That great thing opposite looks just like the Parthenon!”
“Parth yer on!” exclaims a little urchin, apparently emerging from nowhere, and brandishing a torch as big as himself—“Parth, did yer say? Yer on the parth roight enough! Want a loight, loidy?” he adds, reserving further information until he is sure of a customer.
“Yes, yes, to be sure! Don’t leave me whatever you do! Where am I?” distractedly. “What is that place opposite? I saw it a moment ago, but—it’s gone again!” A pause—similar to that which precedes each new slide at a magic-lantern show—follows this speech, then out of the darkness comes the excited exclamation: “There! there it is! Now, what is it?”
“That there?” hoarsely mutters our impish guide with a grin. “Why, that there’s the Kensin’ton Mooseum.”
“The Kensington Museum! Surely it can’t be! Why, it is the very place I have been looking for for hours past. Do you think you can get me across?”
“Git yer across!” with an accent of scorn, “o’ corse I can git yer across. You just keep close alonga me, loidy, and we’ll git over in two ticks.”
With torch held aloft and a hopeful heart he makes a start and—returns to the comparative safety of the pavement. Then he makes a second hoppy trial—with the same result. We begin to feel nervous, and search in our memory for some battle-cry or epic poem with which to fortify our courage, and drop upon Montrose’s lines:
“He either fears his fate too much,