But here’s a poor creature still playing the clarionet down the street, on the pretence of giving pleasure worth a penny.  Yes, my boy, I know you’re out of work, and that is why you play the “Last Rose of Summer” and “When other Lips.”  I am out of work, too, and I can’t play anything.  You say you learnt when a boy, and once played in the orchestra at Drury Lane; but now you’ve come to wandering about suburban streets, and having finished “When other Lips,” you will quite naturally play “My Lodging’s on the Cold Ground.”  Only last night I was playing in an orchestra myself, not a hundred miles (obsolete journalistic tag!)—­not a hundred miles from Drury Lane.  It was a grand orchestra, that of ours.  Night by night it played the symphony of the world, and each night a new symphony was performed, without rehearsal.  The drums of our orchestra were the echoes of thundering wars; the flutes and soft recorders were the eloquence of an Empire’s statesmen; and our ’cellos and violins wailed with the pity of all mankind.  In that vast orchestra I played the horn that sounds the charge, or with its sharp reveille vexes the ear of night before the sun is up.  Here is your penny, my brother in affliction.  I, too, have once joined in the music of a star, and now wander the suburban streets.

That leader-writer has not finished yet, but the proofs of the beginning of his article will be coming down.  In an hour or so his work will be over, and he will pass out into the street exhausted, but happy with the sense of function fulfilled.  Fleet Street is quieter now.  The lamps gleam through the fog, a motor-’bus thunders by, a few late messengers flit along with the latest telegrams, and some stragglers from the restaurants come singing past the Temple.  For a few moments there is silence but for the leader-writer’s quick footsteps on the pavement.  He is some hours in front of the morning’s news, and in a few hours more half a million people will be reading what he has just written, and will quote it to each other as their own.  How often I have had whole sentences of my stuff thrown at me as conclusive arguments almost before the printing ink was dry!

Here I stand, beside a solitary lamp-post upon a suburban acclivity.  The light of the city’s existence I think my successor would say, of her pulsating and palpitating or ebullient existence—­is pale upon the sky, and the murmur of her voice sounds like large but distant waves.  I stand alone, and near me there is no sound but the complaint of a homeless tramp swearing at the cold as he settles down upon a bench for the night.

How I used to swear at that boy for not coming quick enough to fetch my copy!  I knew the young scoundrel’s step—­I knew the step of every man and boy in that office.  I knew the way each of them went up and down the stairs, and coughed or whistled or spat.  What knowledge dies with me now that I am gone! Qualis artifex pereo! But that boy—­how I should love to be swearing at him now!  I wonder whether he misses me?  I hope he does.  “It would be an assurance most dear,” as an old song of exile used to say.