burst out from squat stacks of brickwork and lit the emptiness of
strange and slovenly streets. . . .

And this London was only the foreground of the great scene upon
which he, as a prosperous, well-befriended young Englishman, was
free to play whatever part he could. This narrow turbid tidal river
by which he walked ran out under the bridges eastward beneath the
grey-blue clouds towards Germany, towards Russia, and towards Asia,
which still seemed in those days so largely the Englishman's Asia.
And when you turned about at Blackfriars Bridge this sense of the
round world was so upon you that you faced not merely Westminster,
but the icy Atlantic and America, which one could yet fancy was a
land of Englishmen--Englishmen a little estranged. At any rate they
assimilated, they kept the tongue. The shipping in the lower
reaches below the Tower there carried the flags of every country
under the sky. . . . As he went along the riverside he met a group
of dusky students, Chinese or Japanese. Cambridge had abounded in
Indians; and beneath that tall clock tower at Westminster it seemed
as though the world might centre. The background of the
Englishman's world reached indeed to either pole, it went about the
earth, his background it was--for all that he was capable of doing.
All this had awaited him. . . .

Is it any wonder if a young man with an excitable imagination came
at times to the pitch of audible threats? If the extreme indulgence
of his opportunity and his sense of ability and vigour lifted his
vanity at moments to the kingly pitch? If he ejaculated and made a
gesture or so as he went along the Embankment?