V

THE SIGHTS AND SOUNDS OF THE STREETS


The specialization of those fatuous Orientals, transient as it was, was
of far greater duration than that of most individual impressions from
the London crowd. London is a flood of life, from which in a powerful
light you may catch the shimmering facet of a specific wavelet; but
these fleeting glimpses leave only a blurred record with the most
instantaneous apparatus. What remains of the vision of that long
succession of streets called by successive names from Knightsbridge to
Ludgate Hill is the rush of a human torrent, in which you are scarcely
more aware of the single life than of any given ripple in a river. Men,
women, children form the torrent, but each has been lost to himself in
order to give it the collective immensity which abides in your mind's
eye.

To the American city-dweller the London omnibus is archaic. Except for
the few slow stages that lumber up and down Fifth Avenue, we have hardly
anything of the omnibus kind in the whole length and breadth of our
continent, and it is with perpetual astonishment and amusement that one
finds it still prevailing in London, quite as if it were not as gross an
anachronism as the war-chariot or the sedan-chair. It is ugly, and
bewilderingly painted over with the names of its destinations, and clad
with signs of patent medicines and new plays and breakfast foods in
every color but the colors of the rainbow. It is ponderous and it