must be very near here.'

I pointed it out to him, and he was astonished. 'Why, no--that cannot be!
It is so large a place, and now it looks so small. What is that huge
building beside it?'

'The Hotel Cecil,' I replied.

Then again he shook his head in disapproval. From an artistic standpoint
he strongly objected to the huge caravansary on which builder Hobbs and
pious Jabez Balfour spent so much of other people's money. Soaring
massively and pretentiously into the sky it dwarfed everything around;
and thus, in his opinion, utterly spoilt that part of the Embankment.

'To think, too,' said he, 'that you had such a site, here, along the
river, and allowed it to be used for hotels and clubs, and so forth.
There was room for a Louvre here, and you want one badly; for your
National Gallery, which I well remember visiting in '93, is a most
wretched affair architecturally.'

'But I want to see rather more of the south side of the river,' he added,
after a pause. 'I should like to ascertain if my lion is still there. I
recollect that there was some fog about on the morning after my arrival
at the Savoy in '93; and when I went to the window of my room I noticed
the mist parting--one mass of vapour ascending skyward, while the other
still hovered over the river. And, in the rent between, I espied a lion,
poised in mid air. It amused me vastly; and I called my wife, saying to
her, "Come and see. Here's the British lion waiting to bid us good-day."'

We went to the end of the bridge and thence espied the lion which