I was walking down Piccadilly not long ago, thinking of nursery rhymes and regretting old romance.

As I saw the shopkeepers walk by in their black frock-coats and their black hats, I thought of the old line in nursery annals, “The merchants of London, they wear scarlet.”

The streets were all so unromantic, dreary. Nothing could be done for them, I thought—nothing. And then my thoughts were interrupted by barking dogs. Every dog in the street seemed to be barking—every kind of dog, not only the little ones but the big ones too. They were all facing East towards the way I was coming by. Then I turned round to look and had this vision, in Piccadilly, on the opposite side to the houses just after you pass the cab-rank.

139Tall bent men were coming down the street arrayed in marvellous cloaks. All were sallow of skin and swarthy of hair, and the most of them wore strange beards. They were coming slowly, and they walked with staves, and their hands were out for alms.

All the beggars had come to town.

I would have given them a gold doubloon engraven with the towers of Castille, but I had no such coin. They did not seem the people to whom it were fitting to offer the same coin as one tendered for the use of a taxicab (O marvellous, ill-made word, surely the pass-word somewhere of some evil order). Some of them wore purple cloaks with wide green borders, and the border of green was a narrow strip with some, and some wore cloaks of old and faded red, and some wore violet cloaks, and none wore black. And they begged gracefully, as gods might beg for souls.

I stood by a lamp-post, and they came up to it, and one addressed it, calling the lamp-post brother, and said, “O lamp-post, our brother of the dark, are there many wrecks by thee in the tides of night? Sleep 140not, brother, sleep not. There were many wrecks an it were not for thee.”

It was strange: I had not thought of the majesty of the street lamp and his long watching over drifting men. But he was not beneath the notice of these cloaked strangers.

And then one murmured to the street: “Art thou weary, street? Yet a little longer they shall go up and down, and keep thee clad with tar and wooden bricks. Be patient, street. In a while the earthquake cometh.”

“Who are you?” people said. “And where do you come from?”

“Who may tell what we are,” they answered, “or whence we come?”

And one turned towards the smoke-stained houses, saying, “Blessed be the houses, because men dream therein.”

Then I perceived, what I had never thought, that all these staring houses were not alike, but different one from another, because they held different dreams.

And another turned to a tree that stood by the Green Park railings, saying, “Take comfort, tree, for the fields shall come again.”

141And all the while the ugly smoke went upwards, the smoke that ha............