92 SHOOTING THE GROUSE 



The Dials wake to their dirt, Bloomsbury to its 

 business, and the slums to their squalor ; the lamps 

 are out again now, and the sickly rays of morning 

 rouses the pallid city folk to another day of struggling 

 toil. The shiverings and fevers, vices and terrors, 

 miseries or murders of the London night are even 

 now being turned out naked to its bitter glare ; the 

 thundering din of traffic, the bawling of commerce, 

 and the shrieking of machinery drown in their deafen- 

 ing chorus the weeping of the weak, the moans of 

 the sick and dying, the cries of all their victims. 

 Only the strong, the clever, and the hopeful awake to 

 live in the stream that can no more be stemmed than 

 the tide of the ocean the overwhelming civilisation of 

 a great city. 



But you speed on in peaceful oblivion of all this, 

 in which at other times you bear your part, while you 

 are carried over hills and valleys clad with purple 

 heather, under a sky of boundless blue flecked with 

 shining white clouds, swaying gently round the 

 shoulders of great hills, gliding across deep ravines 

 and in and out of peaceful glens, threading through 

 thriving towns or lazy villages. But now some 

 curious change in the music of the train noises 

 first puzzles, then half rouses you, and then, two 

 feet from your ear, one piercing cry of ' Scotsman,' 



