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VIEW FROM PRIMROSE HILL

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a recent writer says, "would have imagined that this grimy, smoky wilderness of houses, with its factories and its slums, . . . could ever look like the fair and beautiful city of some ethereal vision, embosomed in trees and full of glorious stately monuments? It is even so. Regent's Park lies below, a frame of restful greenery. To the left rises Camden Town - prosaic neighbourhood!-up a gentle slope. In the evening sunlight it is transfigured into a mass of brightness and colour, rising in clear-cut terraces, like some fair city on an Italian hill-top. St. Pancras Station is a thing of beauty, with a Gothic spire, and lines like those of a Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal. Hard by rises the dome of the Reading-Room of the British Museum, embowered in trees—a stately witness to the learning of a continent. St. Paul's soars up grandly above its sister spires, in misty purple-dominating feature of the city - as St. Peter's in Rome. Away towards the mouth of the river rises the high line of Blackheath, and the hills of the Thames valley curve round in a noble sweep above the light haze which marks the unseen river, past the crest of Sydenham Hill with the Crystal Palace shining out white and clear, past Big Ben and the Abbey, and the Mother of Parliaments, to where the ridges above Guildford and Dorking fade away into the fringes of the southward-facing brow' of Sussex and Hampshire, towards the English Channel. Innumerable slender church spires point upwards to the wide over-arching sky. Northward, again, are the wooded heights of Highgate and Hampstead, and the long battlemented line of the fortress at Holloway. What a view! On Primrose Hill on a summer's evening the Londoner feels, indeed, that he is a citizen of no mean city. Wordsworth, truly, thought that 'Earth had not anything to show more fair' than the view from Westminster Bridge in the early morning. But it needs a modern poet-a poet of the whole English-speaking race-to do justice to this view of the great city on the Thames, lying bathed in the magic glow of a summer sunset beneath Primrose Hill."

THE WAYS OF LONDONERS

"Laughing, weeping, hurrying ever,
Hour by hour they crowd along,
While below the mighty river

Sings them all a mocking song."—Molloy.

"An ever-muttering prisoned storm,

The heart of London beating warm."-John Davidson.

WHAT is the best way to see London? "From the top of a 'bus," Mr. Gladstone is said to have sagely remarked. And if you can study London itself from the top of a 'bus, you can also, from the interior of the same convenient, if not always savoury, vehicle, study the ways of Londoners. For, as means of transit, omnibuses and road-cars are every decade, nay, every year, coming yet more into popularity. Soon the patient horses that drag them will disappear and they will transform themselves into "motor-omnibuses," but their general character will be still unaltered. Whether the new electric railway along Oxford Street will at all affect the omnibus public, is a question to be considered; but up to now these popular vehicles have certainly had it all their own way. To the unsophisticated, there seems now even a dash of adventure about them. Why,

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"GARDEN SEATS"

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it is only some twenty years since it was considered bold for a young woman to venture into that hitherto exclusively male

'Bus Driver.

precinct, the very select "knifeboard"; and now, the top of a 'bus usually harbours not one, but a majority of females, while the uncomfortable "knifeboard" itself has given place to the

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NATIONAL RESERVE

CHAP.

luxurious "garden-seat." Then, it was in old days considered necessary to talk of "omnibuses, and now, 'bus is a term as common as "the Zoo," and used not only by "the masses," but even by purists in the English language.

The ways of Londoners, then, as studied in the ubiquitous "'bus," are not at all the ways of any other people. To begin with, the stranger should be warned of the fact that the average Londoner resents being spoken to. He, or she, regards it as an unwarrantable liberty. For the Londoner, at any rate that Londoner whose honour it is to belong to the great and respectable "middle class," prides himself on "keeping 'isself to isself." He, or, again, it is generally she,-is nothing if not conventional, and dreads nothing in life so much as the unexpected. If, therefore, you should show such bad taste as to suddenly die in the 'bus, or in the street, a dirty crowd would, it is true, soon collect round you, but the more respectable would, like the Levite, "pass by on the other side," preferring "not to mix themselves up with any unpleasantness.” "People in London are so rude," I remarked once sadly to a "lady friend" of mine who lived in a "two pair back "in a select mews: "Wyever do you speak to 'em?" was her retortevidently on the principle that you can't expect anything from a wolf but a bite.

But the lowest classes are more genial. They have not got such an overpowering amount of gentility to keep up. They can even afford to be sympathetic. Once I happened to have to ring up a doctor in the small hours of the morning. Hardly had I pulled twice at the midnight bell, when with Gamp-like alacrity two strange figures hurried up, and inquired with breathless anxiety, "Anyone pizened, Miss?" adding, with knowledge born of experience, "Knock at the winder." The advice was at all events opportune. Yes, the very poor have always a certain rude, Dickensian, good nature. Thus, if an old market-woman, for instance, happen to jump into your 'bus at Covent Garden, she will amiably rest her big (and

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distinctly savoury) basket half on your knees, and, mopping her crimson face with a dishcloth, "pass" you the time of day. On the other hand, a great lady and her fashionably dressed daughter will (if you happen to offer your own place for their acceptance) take it without so much as "thank you,” and will then proceed to eye you superciliously through a lorgnette. Truly, our manners do not improve, in all respects, with our social status.

Max O'Rell, in John Bull and his Island, has well hit off the Englishman's little ways when travelling by omnibus :

"Ask John Bull if you are in the right for such and such a place; you will get yes or no for an answer, and nothing more. When he enters an omnibus or a railway carriage, if he does not recognise any one, he eyes his fellow travellers askance in a sulky and suspicious way. He seems to say, 'What a bore it is that all you people can't walk home, and let a man have the carriage comfortably to himself . . . .' London omnibuses are made to seat six persons on each side. These places are not marked out. When, on entering, you find five people on either hand, you must not hope to see any one move to make room for you. No, here everything is left to personal initiative. You simply try to spy out the two pairs of thighs that seem to you the best padded, and with all your weight you let yourself down between them. No need to apologise, no one will think of calling you a bad name."

There is much character to be met with in a 'bus. The incipient or embryo novelist should be encouraged to travel by them. From the time when the poet Shelley frightened the Highgate old lady in a 'bus, by his odd invitation to:

"sit upon the ground,

And tell strange stories of the death of kings

-many romances have been enacted, many curious histories related in them. Omnibuses have before now been utilised as meeting-grounds for young couples whose courtship was tabooed by unkind parents, and who consequently discovered pressing engagements requiring their presence at "Hercules Buildings," or "the Elephant," as the case might be. Mr.

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