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THE SOUL OF LONDON

the Monument, the Dome of St. Paul's. But he will not.

London, with its sense of immensity that we must hurry through to keep unceasing appointments, with its diffuseness, its gatherings up into innumerable trade-centres, innumerable class districts, becomes by its immensity a place upon which there is no beginning. It is, so to speak, a ragoût of tit-bits so appealing and so innumerable—of Gower's tombs and Botticelli's, of miles of port-wine cellars or of the waxen effigies of distinguished murderers—that your actual born-not-made Londoner passes the whole dish by. He is like the good Scot whose haggis is only eaten by conscientious tourists; like the good North German whose alt-bier soup appears at table only for the discomfiture of the English or American cousin. He will not visit his Tower to-day because there will always remain an eternity in which to see it; he will not, to-morrow, ensue at the Millbank National Gallery a severe headache, because that Gallery will always be there.

Our young provincial, in fact, until he has finished, as a separate entity, his sight-seeing, does not become even a potential Londoner. He has to exhaust that as he will have to exhaust the personalities, the localities, that for the time being will make up his "world". He must have had squeezed swiftly into him all the impressions that the London child has slowly made his own. He must have asked all the ways that are to carry him to and from his daily work; he must be able to find instinctively his own front-door, his own key-

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