The stream glides sweetly with a pleasant trotting tinkle of bells by the green parkside of Piccadilly, and sweet is it to hear the sirens singing, and to see them combing their gilded locks, on the yellow sands of Piccadilly Circus—­so called, no doubt, from the number of horses and the skill of their drivers.  Here are the whirling pools of pleasure, merry wheels of laughing waters, where your hansom glides along with a golden ease—­it is only when you enter the First Cataract of the Strand that you become aware of the far-distant terrible roar of the Falls!  They are yet nearly two miles away, but already, like Niagara, thou hearest the sound thereof—­the fateful sound of that human Niagara, where all the great rivers of London converge:  the dark, strong floods surging out from the gloomy fastnesses of the East End, the quick-running streams from the palaces of the West, the East with its wagons, the West with its hansoms, the four winds with their omnibuses, the horses and carriages under the earth jetting up their companies of grimy passengers, the very air busy with a million errands.

You are in the rapids—­metaphorically speaking—­as you crawl down Cheapside; and here where the Bank of England and the Mansion House rise sheer and awful from, shall we say, this boiling caldron, this ‘hell’ of angry meeting waters—­Threadneedle Street and Cornhill, Queen Victoria Street and Cheapside, each ‘running,’ again metaphorically, ’like a mill-race’—­here in this wild maelstrom of human life and human conveyances, here is the true ‘Niagara in London,’ here are the most wonderful falls in the world—­the London Falls.

‘Yes!’ I said softly to myself, and I could see the sly sad smile on the face of the dead poet, at the thought of whose serene wisdom a silence like snow seemed momentarily to cover up the turmoil—­’Yes!’ I said softly, ’there is still the same old crush at the corner of Fenchurch Street!’

By this time I had disbursed one of my two annual cab-fares, and was standing a little forlorn at that very corner.  It was a March afternoon, bitter and gloomy; lamps were already popping alight in a desolate way, and the east wind whistled mournfully through the ribs of the passers-by.  A very unflowerlike man was dejectedly calling out ‘daffadowndillies’ close by.  The sound of the pretty old word, thus quaintly spoken, brightened the air better than the electric lights which suddenly shot rows of wintry moonlight along the streets.  I bought a bunch of the poor pinched flowers, and asked the man how he came to call them ‘daffadowndillies.’

‘D’vunshur,’ he said, in anything but a Devonshire accent, and then the east wind took him and he was gone—­doubtless to a neighbouring tavern; and no wonder, poor soul!  Flowers certainly fall into strange hands here in London.