circle of flame descending upon the greatest and most elevated of
Admirals at the head of the Strand, with illumination of smoke-plumed
chimneys, house-roofs, window-panes, weather-vanes, monument and
pedimental monsters, and omnibus umbrella. One would fair believe that
they advance admireing; they are assuredly made handsome by the beams.
No longer mere concurrent atoms of the furnace of business (from coal-
dust to sparks, rushing, as it were, on respiratory blasts of an enormous
engine's centripetal and centrifugal energy), their step is leisurely to
meet the rosy Dinner, which is ever a see-saw with the God of Light in
his fall; the mask of the noble human visage upon them is not roughened,
as at midday, by those knotted hard ridges of the scrambler's hand seen
from forehead down to jaw; when indeed they have all the appearance of
sour scientific productions. And unhappily for the national portrait, in
the Poem quoted, the Rajah's Minister chose an hour between morning and
meridian, or at least before an astonished luncheon had come to composure
inside their persons, for drawing his Master's attention to the quaint
similarity of feature in the units of the busy antish congregates they
had travelled so far to visit and to study:

These Britons wear
The driven and perplexed look of men
Begotten hastily 'twixt business hours

It could not have been late afternoon.

These Orientals should have seen them, with Victor Radnor among them,
fronting the smoky splendours of the sunset. In April, the month of
piled and hurried cloud, it is a Rape of the Sabines overhead from all
quarters, either one of the winds brawnily larcenous; and London, smoking
royally to the open skies, builds images of a dusty epic fray for