the same forces, the same methods, are employed in the little as in the big of these examples.  Why should mere accumulation, reiteration, and magnification make the difference?  We may ask why?  But it does, for all that.  If we answer that these mammoth multiplications impress us because they are so much bigger, taller, fatter, faster, etc., than we are, the question arises—­How many times bigger than a man must a mountain be before it impresses us?  Perhaps the problem has already been tackled by the schoolman who pondered how many angels could dance on the point of a needle.

However, these and similar first principles, it will readily be seen, are far from being irrelevant for the visitor at the Earl’s Court Exhibition.  No doubt they are continually discussed by the thousands who daily and nightly throng that very charming dream-world which Mr. Kiralfy has built ‘midmost the beating’ of our ‘steely sea.’

To an age that is over-read and over-fed Mr. Kiralfy brings the message:  ‘Leave your great minds at home, and go up the Great Wheel!’ and I heard his voice and obeyed.  The sensation is, I should say, something between going up in a balloon and being upon shipboard—­a sensation compounded, maybe, of the creaking of the circular rigging, the pleasure of rising in the air, the freshening of the air as you ascend, the strange feeling of the earth receding and spreading out beneath you, the curious diminution of the people below—­to their proper size.  You will hear original minds all about you comparing them to ants, and it is curious to notice the involuntary feeling of contempt that possesses you as you watch them.  I believe one has a half-defined illusion that we are growing greater as they are growing smaller.  Ants and flies! ants and flies! with here and there a fiery centipede in the shape of a District train dashing in and out amongst them.  We lose the power of understanding their motions, and their throngs and movements do indeed seem as purposeless at this height as the hurry-scurrying about an anthill.  At this height, indeed, one seems to understand how small a matter a bank smash may seem to the Almighty; though, as a lady said to me—­as we clung tightly together in terror ’a-top of the topmost bough’—­it must be gratifying to see so many churches.

Those who would keep their illusions about the beauty of London had better stay below, at least in the daytime, for it makes one’s heart sink to look on those miles and miles of sordid grey roofs huddled in meaningless rows and crescents, just for all the world like a huge child’s box of wooden bricks waiting to be arranged into some intelligible pattern.  Of course, this is not London proper.  Were the Great Wheel set up in Trafalgar Square, one is fain to hope that the view from it would be less disheartening—­though it might be better not to try.