building. But it was a good place to do work in, for all its quiescence.
I was soon beyond the small requirements of the Pharmaceutical Society's
examination, and as they do not permit candidates to sit for that until
one and twenty, I was presently filling up my time and preventing my
studies becoming too desultory by making an attack upon the London
University degree of Bachelor of Science, which impressed me then as
a very splendid but almost impossible achievement. The degree
in mathematics and chemistry appealed to me as particularly
congenial--albeit giddily inaccessible. I set to work. I had presently
to arrange a holiday and go to London to matriculate, and so it was I
came upon my aunt and uncle again. In many ways that visit marked an
epoch. It was my first impression of London at all. I was then nineteen,
and by a conspiracy of chances my nearest approach to that human
wilderness had been my brief visit to Chatham. Chatham too had been my
largest town. So that I got London at last with an exceptional freshness
of effect, as the sudden revelation of a whole unsuspected other side to
life.

I came to it on a dull and smoky day by the South Eastern Railway, and
our train was half an hour late, stopping and going on and stopping
again. I marked beyond Chiselhurst the growing multitude of villas,
and so came stage by stage through multiplying houses and diminishing
interspaces of market garden and dingy grass to regions of interlacing
railway lines, big factories, gasometers and wide reeking swamps of
dingy little homes, more of them and more and more. The number of these
and their dinginess and poverty increased, and here rose a great public
house and here a Board School and there a gaunt factory; and away to the
east there loomed for a time a queer, incongruous forest of masts and
spars. The congestion of houses intensified and piled up presently into
tenements; I marveled more and more at this boundless world of dingy