away. Soon other walls will be rising--red-brick `residential' walls,
more in harmony with the Zeitgeist. None but I pays any heed to the
ruins. I am their only friend. Me they attract so irresistibly that I
haunt the door of the hoarding that encloses them, and am frequently
mistaken for the foreman.

A few summers ago, I was watching, with more than usual emotion, the
rasure of a great edifice at a corner of Hanover Square. There were
two reasons why this rasure especially affected me. I had known the
edifice so well, by sight, ever since I was a small boy, and I had
always admired it as a fine example of that kind of architecture which
is the most suitable to London's atmosphere. Though I must have passed
it thousands of times, I had never passed without an upward smile of
approval that gaunt and sombre fa‡ade, with its long straight windows,
its well-spaced columns, its long straight coping against the London
sky. My eyes deplored that these noble and familiar things must
perish. For sake of what they had sheltered, my heart deplored that
they must perish. The falling edifice had not been exactly a home. It
had been even more than that. It had been a refuge from many homes. It
had been a club.

Certainly it had not been a particularly distinguished club. Its
demolition could not have been stayed on the plea that Charles James
Fox had squandered his substance in its card-room, or that Lord
Melbourne had loved to doze on the bench in its hall. Nothing sublime
had happened in it. No sublime person had belonged to it. Persons
without the vaguest pretensions to sublimity had always, I believe,
found quick and easy entrance into it. It had been a large nondescript
affair. But (to adapt Byron) a club's a club tho' every one's in it.
The ceremony of election gives it a cachet which not even the smartest