Meantime he spent his days, and a great part of his nights also, in the streets. There he was like a piece of helpless driftwood in the roaring current of life, always going on yet never going anywhere, always floating along yet never making headway. The ceaseless stream in the busy thoroughfares tormented him terribly, but the emptiness of the obscurer streets tortured him still more, and the blankness of Sunday morning in the Strand afflicted him most keenly of all, for it was full of memories of Sunday morning in Iceland with its atmosphere of peace and rest and the sound of church bells.
When he was at his lowest depths of hopelessness he sent his first letter home.
"Dearest Mother," he wrote, sitting in his stuffy back room overlooking the roof-tops, "You would naturally have expected to hear from me before this, and I certainly should have written earlier, only that I have been waiting for a long, quiet hour in which I could tell you all the news, everything that has happened to me since we parted on the steamer and I saw your dear face disappearing in the boat. That hour seems never to come, so I must snatch a few moments without any more delay to say that all is well and everything goes swimmingly."
"The dear old soul, why should I make her miserable?" he thought.
"You will easily understand that in a great city like London, especially when one is beginning again and one has so much to do and so many people to see, there is not an hour left for oneself and hardly a moment to write a letter. But this does not prevent my thinking of you at all events, and I do so every day and always."
"That's true at least," he told himself, and he went on boldly with his affectionate fictions.
"I know that my dear little mamma will want to know first the condition of my creature comforts and I hasten to tell her that these are as right as can be. This is a large and handsome house just off the tide of greatest traffic where splendid horse wagons (called omnibuses) and upholstered sleighs on wheels (called hansoms) roll about in countless numbers day and night, making a roar like that of the Ellida river where it falls into the fiord. But my bedroom, in which I am writing this letter, is quiet and cozy and homelike, and my landlady is a good little creature who visits me daily and is always most kind and motherly."
As he went on his pen flowed freely and his handwriting became big and reckless.
"I am making new and influential acquaintances every day, and seeing in the flesh the faces we are all familiar with in prints. Walking in the Park yesterday I passed the Queen, who is one of our own princesses, you know, so I felt myself entitled to bow to her and she bowed back with the sweetest courtesy. I see the Prime Minister frequently, for he lives in a house that is only down the street and round the corner, and the homes and offices of nearly all the Ministers of State are within a stone's throw of this place. In fact one way or another I am certainly coming in touch with the leading men in England, and when I open my window at night I can see the light that burns in the clock-tower above the Houses of Parliament.
"So you see that I am finding life wonderfully interesting in this mighty maelstrom of human activity, and if I do not write as often as I ought, my anxious little mamma is not to imagine there is anything amiss with me, but merely to tell herself that no news is good news and that I am immersed in many occupations.