streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous
line of taxi-cabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an
endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and dipping
them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of
the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace. It was the hour
of the boat-trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack
of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these
places. The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great
flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no signs
of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces. There was nothing
in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly
appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of
my existence. For this was the station at which, thirty-seven years
before, I arrived on my first visit to London. Not the same building,
but the same spot. At nineteen years of age, after a period of probation
and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a
North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft--my first long railway
journey in England--to "sign on" for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water
ship. Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city
with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and
unexplored wilderness. No explorer could have been more lonely. I did
not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled
the mysterious distances of the streets. I cannot say I was free from a
little youthful awe, but at that age one's feelings are simple. I was
elated. I was pursuing a clear aim, I was carrying out a deliberate plan
of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the
service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to
live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself,