defeated. Nothing thereabouts had very much changed since he lost
his battle and his head. An eighteenth-century American boy fresh
from Boston naturally took it all for education, and was amused
at this sort of lesson. At least he thought he felt it.

Then came the journey up to London through Birmingham and the
Black District, another lesson, which needed much more to be
rightly felt. The plunge into darkness lurid with flames; the
sense of unknown horror in this weird gloom which then existed
nowhere else, and never had existed before, except in volcanic
craters; the violent contrast between this dense, smoky,
impenetrable darkness, and the soft green charm that one glided
into, as one emerged -- the revelation of an unknown society of
the pit -- made a boy uncomfortable, though he had no idea that
Karl Marx was standing there waiting for him, and that sooner or
later the process of education would have to deal with Karl Marx
much more than with Professor Bowen of Harvard College or his
Satanic free-trade majesty John Stuart Mill. The Black District
was a practical education, but it was infinitely far in the
distance. The boy ran away from it, as he ran away from
everything he disliked.

Had he known enough to know where to begin he would have seen
something to study, more vital than the Civil Law, in the long,
muddy, dirty, sordid, gas-lit dreariness of Oxford Street as his
dingy four-wheeler dragged its weary way to Charing Cross. He did
notice one peculiarity about it worth remembering. London was
still London. A certain style dignified its grime; heavy, clumsy,
arrogant, purse-proud, but not cheap; insular but large; barely
tolerant of an outside world, and absolutely self-confident. The