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Where the ebbing tide flows softly through worn arches to the sea, you may hear the stone-faced City talking to the restless waters: “Why will you never stay with me? Why come but to go?”

“I cannot say, I do not understand. From the deep sea I come, but only as a bird loosed from a child’s hand with a cord. When she calls I must return.”

“It is so with these children of mine. They come to me, I know not whence. I nurse them for a little while, till a hand I do not see plucks them back. And others take their place.”

Through the still air there passes a ripple of sound. The sleeping City stirs with a faint sigh. A distant milk-cart rattling by raises a thousand echoes; it is the vanguard of a yoked army. Soon from every street there rises the soothing cry, “Mee’hilk–mee’hilk.”

London like some Gargantuan babe, is awake, crying for its milk. These be the white-smocked nurses hastening with its morning nourishment. The early church bells ring. “You have had your milk, little London. Now come and say your prayers. Another week has just begun, baby London. God knows what will happen, say your prayers.”

One by one the little creatures creep from behind the blinds into the streets. The brooding tenderness is vanished from the City’s face. The fretful noises of the day have come again. Silence, her lover of the night, kisses her stone lips, and steals away. And you, gentle Reader, return home, garlanded with the self-sufficiency of the early riser.

But it was of a certain week-day morning, in the Strand that I was thinking. I was standing outside Gatti’s Restaurant, where I had just breakfasted, listening leisurely to an argument between an indignant lady passenger, presumably of Irish extraction, and an omnibus conductor.

“For what d’ye want thin to paint Putney on ye’r bus, if ye don’t GO to Putney?” said the lady.

“We DO go to Putney,” said the conductor.

“Thin why did ye put me out here?”

“I didn’t put you out, yer got out.”

“Shure, didn’t the gintleman in the corner tell me I was comin’ further away from Putney ivery minit?”

“Wal, and so yer was.”

“Thin whoy didn’t you tell me?”

“How was I to know yer wanted to go to Putney? Yer sings out Putney, and I stops and in yer jumps.”

“And for what d’ye think I called out Putney thin?”

“‘Cause it’s my name, or rayther the bus’s name. This ‘ere IS a Putney.”

“How can it be a Putney whin it isn’t goin’ to Putney, ye gomerhawk?”

“Ain’t you an Hirishwoman?” retorted the conductor. “Course yer are. But yer aren’t always goin’ to Ireland. We’re goin’ to Putney in time, only we’re a-going to Liverpool Street fust. ‘Igher up, Jim.”

The bus moved on, and I was about cross the road, when a man, muttering savagely to himself, walked into me. He would have swept past me had I not, recognizing him, arrested him. It was my friend B—–, a busy editor of magazines and journals. It was some seconds before he appeared able to struggle out of his abstraction, and remember himself. “Halloo,” he then said, “who would have thought of seeing YOU here?”

“To judge by the way you were walking,” I replied, “one would imagine the Strand the last place in which you expected to see any human being. Do you ever walk into a short-tempered, muscular man?”

“Did I walk into you?” he asked surprised.

“Well, not right in,” I answered, “I if we are to be literal. You walked on to me; if I had not stopped you, I suppose you would have walked over me.”

“It is this confounded Christmas business,” he explained. “It drives me off my head.”

“I have heard Christmas advanced as an excuse for many things,” I replied, “but not early in September.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” he answered, “we are in the middle of our Christmas number. I am working day and night upon it. By the bye,” he added, “that puts me in mind. I am arranging a symposium, and I want you to join. ‘Should Christmas,'”–I interrupted him.