he advanced into the labyrinth of the south-west, his ear was
gradually mastered by the silence. Street after street looked down
upon his solitary figure, house after house echoed upon his passage
with a ghostly jar, shop after shop displayed its shuttered front
and its commercial legend; and meanwhile he steered his course,
under day's effulgent dome and through this encampment of diurnal
sleepers, lonely as a ship.

'Here,' he reflected, 'if I were like my scatter-brained companion,
here were indeed the scene where I might look for an adventure.
Here, in broad day, the streets are secret as in the blackest night
of January, and in the midst of some four million sleepers,
solitary as the woods of Yucatan. If I but raise my voice I could
summon up the number of an army, and yet the grave is not more
silent than this city of sleep.'

He was still following these quaint and serious musings when he
came into a street of more mingled ingredients than was common in
the quarter. Here, on the one hand, framed in walls and the green
tops of trees, were several of those discreet, bijou residences on
which propriety is apt to look askance. Here, too, were many of
the brick-fronted barracks of the poor; a plaster cow, perhaps,
serving as ensign to a dairy, or a ticket announcing the business
of the mangler. Before one such house, that stood a little
separate among walled gardens, a cat was playing with a straw, and
Challoner paused a moment, looking on this sleek and solitary
creature, who seemed an emblem of the neighbouring peace. With the
cessation of the sound of his own steps the silence fell dead; the
house stood smokeless: the blinds down, the whole machinery of
life arrested; and it seemed to Challoner that he should hear the