He saw the pink dawn glimmer through the trees in St. James's
Park. He saw the bridges empty, the smoke-stained buildings deserted by
their inhabitants, with St. Paul's in the background like a sentinel
watching over the sleeping world. He heard the crash and roar of life
die away and he watched like an anxious prophet while the city slept.
He looked upon the stereotyped horrors of the Embankment, vitalized and
actual to him now in the light of his new understanding. He wandered
with the first gleam of light among the flower-beds of the Park,
sniffing with joy at the late hyacinths, revelling in the cool, sweet
softness of the unpolluted air. Then he listened to the awakening, to
the birth of the day. He heard it from the bridges, from London Bridge
and Westminster Bridge, over which thundered the great vans fresh from
the country, on their way to Covent Garden. He stood in front of the
Mansion House and watched the thin, black stream of the earliest corners
grow into a surging, black-coated torrent. There were things which made
him sorry and there were things which made him glad. On the whole,
however, his isolated contemplation of what for so long he had taken as
a matter of course depressed him.
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