London, the London before the war, flaunting its enormous glare, as of a monstrous conflagration up into the black sky—­with its best Venice-like aspect of rainy evenings, the wet asphalted streets lying with the sheen of sleeping water in winding canals, and the great houses of the city towering all dark, like empty palaces, above the reflected lights of the glistening roadway.

Everything in the subdued incomplete night-life around the Mansion House went on normally with its fascinating air of a dead commercial city of sombre walls through which the inextinguishable activity of its millions streamed East and West in a brilliant flow of lighted vehicles.

In Liverpool Street, as usual too, through the double gates, a continuous line of taxi-cabs glided down the inclined approach and up again, like an endless chain of dredger-buckets, pouring in the passengers, and dipping them out of the great railway station under the inexorable pallid face of the clock telling off the diminishing minutes of peace.  It was the hour of the boat-trains to Holland, to Hamburg, and there seemed to be no lack of people, fearless, reckless, or ignorant, who wanted to go to these places.  The station was normally crowded, and if there was a great flutter of evening papers in the multitude of hands there were no signs of extraordinary emotion on that multitude of faces.  There was nothing in them to distract me from the thought that it was singularly appropriate that I should start from this station on the retraced way of my existence.  For this was the station at which, thirty-seven years before, I arrived on my first visit to London.  Not the same building, but the same spot.  At nineteen years of age, after a period of probation and training I had imposed upon myself as ordinary seaman on board a North Sea coaster, I had come up from Lowestoft—­my first long railway journey in England—­to “sign on” for an Antipodean voyage in a deep-water ship.  Straight from a railway carriage I had walked into the great city with something of the feeling of a traveller penetrating into a vast and unexplored wilderness.  No explorer could have been more lonely.  I did not know a single soul of all these millions that all around me peopled the mysterious distances of the streets.  I cannot say I was free from a little youthful awe, but at that age one’s feelings are simple.  I was elated.  I was pursuing a clear aim, I was carrying out a deliberate plan of making out of myself, in the first place, a seaman worthy of the service, good enough to work by the side of the men with whom I was to live; and in the second place, I had to justify my existence to myself, to redeem a tacit moral pledge.  Both these aims were to be attained by the same effort.  How simple seemed the problem of life then, on that hazy day of early September in the year 1878, when I entered London for the first time.