SLEEPLESS LONDON.

Press, Volume LV, Issue 10215, 10 December 1898, Page 3

SLEEPLESS LONDON.

FOOD, LETTERS, AND NEWSPAPERS. Br G. W. St__v_ns, in' TiiK Daily Mail. The hardest-worked of London's thorough fares is Fleet street; its bedtime is from 1 tc 3. These are the hours they seize upon tt wash it; by the time the last suburban homegoer has got to Ludgate hill the vestry met are out with their hose to sluice the pool tired thing down. It is almost empty. A hansom or two lays in wait- for the infrequent editor. The policeman stands in it reverie to read the bill of fare of the long cold restaurant and wonders what "chou_ fleurs au gratin" might be. Go back at three—when the rest of London has got soundly .to its rest —and Flc&i street, hardly dry from its morning tub, is ir the flush of its morning's work. A dul] grinding roar runs surf-like along its twe shores—the sounds of many printing machines.. Carts are moving through winding alleys out of gas-fit stables. Piles of newspapers grow up on its pavements, and presently, one by one, the carts clatter away. The muffled shrieks of whistles, and th« clang of distant buffers remind you that the railway stations, they also, never sleep. Clatter .and whistle and clank—yet witi it all Fleet street is unearthly still. Yo* miss the background—the roar, the orchestration of the London streets which in the day-time accompanies and harmonises all the leading notes. At night the roar is gone; a cart comes round a corner with a crash thai almost startles. It is the same with sight as with sound. It seems a paradox, but th< night is the only time when you can sec London. In the day-time if you tried tc look up you would be knocked down. Moreover it rever occurs to you ; the ever-drivim: torrent of traffic keeps the eye down, and you forget that the buildings are anything more than the frontiers of the road way. Go down to the Embankment, foi example, and you can see the Thames. Blackfriars and " Waterloo Bridges an coronets of lr.mns; between them the vener able river is half seen, half divined'througl his mantle of mist. He is darkly turbid ir the yellow gaslight, and you can smell hi! nakedness; yet he is very great and deep and strong, bearing up the. heavy barges lightly, running up and down, powerful!) yet not violently, through the heart of th< City,' reminding iis that we are of the sea, A barge drifts past like a phantom, th( clink of the windlass on another insists 01

irmking itself known more intimately than |by day. Here, again, London never .sleeps;

i but, ever carrying, scavenging seething, in- [ spiring, the most wakeful of all Londoners E is the Thames: - > i "Whispering terrible things and dear"—.' -! to all of us—=-whispering of trade and Emi' pire to some, but whisnerihg "perhaps some- > ' thing else, not less terrible and dear, to these ' | shadow-shapes on the Embankment benches. •'; They, too, are part of - sleepless London— . I because they must. The rule is that you - ; may sit on the Embankment seats,. but -; you mustn't doss there; and that rule the > police enforce. So you see dim forms rise i ; up at the reveille of the policeman's.boot, • | and walk themselves awake again, passing .jon to the next seat. But that is full—three , i old men and an old-young woman, their c' clothes swaddled round -hem as far as they i ' will go. A boy—thank Heaven for boys! ; — i! has had the idea of hiding himself behind b one of the parapets near the river police- ( station and' sleeps profoundly. So does a r gentleman with a white tie showing over his . coat, sitting with his bead, swinging out-- ' board as if it would break off and tumble . j into the tall hat which rolls at his side. > ! Snoring richly, he is—for the moment—the , ' happiest -na.n on the Embankment. For the j : rest of them—they are London's bad dreams. . There are three things, you soon per- [ J ceive, for which. London will not wait—food, | letters, and newspapers. The pa~»er carts \ are still clattering towards the stations, and I there is nothing to compete with them but ' the four-horsed parcel-post vans and the • market wains. They both breathe of the country, and altogether at night London is ' very much, nearer to the fields outside than J ■ she is by day. The ppstrvans have come up by road from anywhere within fifty miles, for ' ; all the world like stage-coaches; they are a ! i suggestive comment on our loose control over * ! our railways. ■ { The big draught horses and big waggons : have not come so far; but they have coma L ! fax enough, to give you a smell of. apples jand \ turnips almost as sweet as hay.. At Covent i Garden you find them slowly'choking up 5 the maze of little streets. Porters pass ' slowly up and. down ; work is in fall swing ;' j but again it is curiously silent. The men are too sleepy to'give you the full benefit ? of their mixture of country and Cockney, there is no sound but the scrunch of heavy " , wheels, backing to their unloading places, ' j and $he slithering of heavy iron-shod feet -on the sticky cobbles as the luckier bosses .'file off to their sfcaules!. The bait-stable r might come straight from ; a--farm—just B -a big white-washed blank with a manger ialong one sod; the _msll'C_ this, too, feu

' stolen swwrtaiess" from tlt'a fields. Govent Garden is half-lit and half-asleep; Smiihfield, on the other hand, flares with * light and echoes with strong voices. Through the broad streets you are guided _ by meat waggons of a form seldom seen 3 by daylight—a sort of railway horse-box on whee-% only witli open sides, which -how you. half-oxen hanging, each in its own cwmpSfftmeot, from-the roof. Through the alleys about Little Britain you may follow a steady stream of .salesmen, brisker than" the vegetable people of Covent Gku> B den.. And the big market is a blaze of J light and colour; ie might be a scene from * on Empire ballet. Corridors of shilling i meat—with crimson and dazaiing yellow _-J fat; among them porters with whole sides ■~i of beef, whole sheep, whole pigs with shut eye-slits' and fore-trotters crossed in an atj titude of prayer. In long white mackintosh coat each salesman stands before his meat —row on row of it, street on street, van on _.van outside, a little city of gas-jets and =: raw, meat. . | But London is not all bear; the General Post Qflace also is an island of gaslight, and c the redmailcarts are lumbering off after tie c newspapers towards the early trains. But ;go on to Cheapside, and at last you come to what you sought—London asleep. Here, a indeed, the City is paved with silence. The . very policeman hardly breaks it, for most of B his time he is bending down over locks to B see if anybody is out a-burgling. You can a look down glades of houses, all asleep, and t see not a single living thing. And all the t time, dim as the light is, you find yourself B discovering beauties and interests passed a 6 hundred times unsuspected in the broad light. 3 The City churches, by day otiose survivals _ of a dead past, now, becomes the focusses of ~ hitherto unixticed street-scapes. The Bank j is mean, andthe only interesting thing about g the Royal Exchange is its grasshopper. But a church of St. Peter lets a serene classical r face into the architecture of Cornhill that ;. digrufies all the street and the key on the top c of it is the dominant note of a whole eye- .. full. Near ltfyou see an ornate Gothic porch, Q where, till now. you have only seen ornate a stockbrokers. Queerest of all is a little a country'--Quaker meeting-house, right in the 1% middle of Bishopsgate street, a couple of s very old shops for its lower story, going by y j the name of St. Ethelburga's. We seem to c ; have heard of it in some, connection with „ Mr Kensit, or Father Black, or some other c J Church-brawler; but who ever set eyes on it n j in Bishopsgate street?

Time has been crawling on—you must try walking aimlessly all night before you can

realise how slowly. Now it is, half-past five. Pacing half asleep along Bishopsgate, street, you meet a working wan, striding smartly, his dinner in a red handkerchief. '' - Behind comes another,, and another, then two, then a group.' You notice that they all step onward as- with a purpose, sq differently from the f loafers of tbenight. These must be moaning' 'peoplej beginning their day, not ending, it, Then you. turn the, corner .of Liverpool street, and a thick column of men is streaming out of the Great Eastern Station, heading across the road, plunging forward into the streets all around.

And suddenly, all at once, it is morning. Dawn steals up shyly under electric lamps, ' but now you see that the sky has lightened ' from dark grey to nearly white. Things begin, to clothe themselves ,in their day ' colours: You feel the breath of the morning I lon your face and its indefinable stirring in | your blood—yes, even in Finsbury, you feel it. People. crowd in round every corner, from every opening as at a cue; they might be the chorus filling up the stage of an opera.' From Broad street now as well as i Liverpool street, on foot, on bicycles;- leaping down from the tailboards of railway I wagons/, they, come and come. A publichouse, closed a moment ago, is suddenly open.,- From" nowhere spring up men at every corner selling the Daily Mail. For two hours they pour in steadily; faster and faster the stations vomit them out, till succeeding train-loads merge into one continuous torrent of people. Nearly all men,' which isvcharacteristic of the land Where the wOTking-man brings a cup of tea to his wife's bedside; abroad a large.proportion would be women. The wonder is where, they all go ta. For though London is clearly, awake and has already absorbed its .thousands. it hardly seems less empty than before. A few men at -work on a building, an electrical I engineer on a doorstep just getting to work at his dynamos, a man moving a- dust-bin j—that is all; so far. London is so vast that I they soak in no deeper than this. But" aIT the fringeis waking now. And I every station pours in its fresh hordes.. Pre- ! sentry atho sliops are. opening. The .first tall [hat rises splendidly on the. scene, and Lon- \ don is awake indeed.