_London!_" as if I might look to be often mishandled by bandits of
the sort; but nothing like it ever befell me again. In fact the security
and gentleness with which life is operated in the capital of the world
is one of the kind things makes you forget its immensity. Your personal
comfort and safety are so perfectly assured that you might well mistake
yourself for one of very few people instead of so many.

London is like nature in its vastness, simplicity, and deliberation, and
if it hurried or worried, it would be like the precession of the
equinoxes getting a move on, and would shake the earth. The street
events are few. In my nine or ten weeks' sojourn, so largely spent in
the streets, I saw the body of only one accident worse than a cab-horse
falling; but that was early in my stay when I expected to see many more.
We were going to the old church of St. Bartholomew, and were walking by
the hospital of the same name just as a cab drove up to its gate bearing
the body of the accident. It was a young man whose bleeding face hung
upon his breast and whose limp arm another young man of the same station
in life held round his own neck, to stay the sufferer on the seat beside
him. A crowd was already following, and it gathered so quickly at the
high iron fence that the most censorious witness could hardly see with
what clumsiness the wounded man was half-dragged, half-lifted from the
cab by the hospital assistants, and stretched upon the ground till he
could be duly carried into the hospital. It may have been a casualty of
the many incident to alcoholism; at the best it was a result of single
combat, which, though it prepared us in a sort for the mediaeval
atmosphere of the church, was yet not of the tragic dignity which would
have come in the way of a more heroical imagination.

It was indeed so little worthy of the place, however characteristic of
the observer, that I made haste to forget it as I entered the