It is delightful to walk across Temple Gardens, to
stop--pigeons are sweeping down from the roofs--to call a hansom, and
to notice, as one passes, the sapling behind St. Clement's Danes. The
quality of the green is exquisite on the smoke-black wall. London can
be seen better on Sundays than on week-days; lying back in a hansom,
one is alone with London. London is beautiful in that narrow street,
celebrated for licentious literature. The blue and white sky shows
above a seventeenth-century gable, and a few moments after we are in
Drury Lane. The fine weather has enticed the population out of grim
courts and alleys; skipping-ropes are whirling everywhere. The
children hardly escape being run over. Coster girls sit wrapped in
shawls, contentedly, like rabbits at the edge of a burrow; the men
smoke their pipes in sullen groups, their eyes on the closed doors of
the public house. At the corner of the great theatre a vendor of cheap
ices is rapidly absorbing the few spare pennies of the neighbourhood.
The hansom turns out of the lane into the great thoroughfare, a bright
glow like the sunset fills the roadway, and upon it a triangular block
of masonry and St. Giles's church rise, the spire aloft in the faint
blue and delicate air.
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