There is a faint freshness in the London night as though some strayed
reveler of a breeze had left his comrades in the Kentish uplands and had
entered the town by stealth. The pavements are a little damp and shiny.
Upon one's ears that at this late hour have become very acute there hits
the tap of a remote footfall. Louder and louder grow the taps, filling the
whole night. And a black cloaked figure passes by, and goes tapping into
the dark. One who has danced goes homewards. Somewhere a ball has closed
its doors and ended. Its yellow lights are out, its musicians are silent,
its dancers have all gone into the night air, and Time has said of it,
"Let it be past and over, and among the things that I have put away."

Shadows begin to detach themselves from their great gathering places. No
less silently than those shadows that are thin and dead move homewards the
stealthy cats. Thus have we even in London our faint forebodings of the
dawn's approach, which the birds and the beasts and the stars are crying
aloud to the untrammeled fields.

At what moment I know not I perceive that the night itself is irrevocably
overthrown. It is suddenly revealed to me by the weary pallor of the
street lamps that the streets are silent and nocturnal still, not because
there is any strength in night, but because men have not yet arisen from
sleep to defy him. So have I seen dejected and untidy guards still bearing
antique muskets in palatial gateways, although the realms of the monarch
that they guard have shrunk to a single province which no enemy yet has
troubled to overrun.

And it is now manifest from the aspect of the street lamps, those abashed
dependants of night, that already English mountain peaks have seen the
dawn, that the cliffs of Dover are standing white to the morning, that the