lamps and one treads unwarned into thick soft Thames mud. They seem
to be purely architectural steps, they lead nowhere, they have an
air of absolute indifference to mortal ends.

Those shapes and large inhuman places--for all of mankind that one
sees at night about Lambeth is minute and pitiful beside the
industrial monsters that snort and toil there--mix up inextricably
with my memories of my first days as a legislator. Black figures
drift by me, heavy vans clatter, a newspaper rough tears by on a
motor bicycle, and presently, on the Albert Embankment, every seat
has its one or two outcasts huddled together and slumbering.

"These things come, these things go," a whispering voice urged upon
me, "as once those vast unmeaning Saurians whose bones encumber
museums came and went rejoicing noisily in fruitless lives." . . .

Fruitless lives!--was that the truth of it all? . . .

Later I stood within sight of the Houses of Parliament in front of
the colonnades of St Thomas's Hospital. I leant on the parapet
close by a lamp-stand of twisted dolphins--and I prayed!

I remember the swirl of the tide upon the water, and how a string of
barges presently came swinging and bumping round as high-water
turned to ebb. That sudden change of position and my brief
perplexity at it, sticks like a paper pin through the substance of
my thoughts. It was then I was moved to prayer. I prayed that
night that life might not be in vain, that in particular I might not
live in vain. I prayed for strength and faith, that the monstrous
blundering forces in life might not overwhelm me, might not beat me