For months together London does not see the colour of life in any mass.  The human face does not give much of it, what with features, and beards, and the shadow of the top-hat and chapeau melon of man, and of the veils of woman.  Besides, the colour of the face is subject to a thousand injuries and accidents.  The popular face of the Londoner has soon lost its gold, its white, and the delicacy of its red and brown.  We miss little beauty by the fact that it is never seen freely in great numbers out-of-doors.  You get it in some quantity when all the heads of a great indoor meeting are turned at once upon a speaker; but it is only in the open air, needless to say, that the colour of life is in perfection, in the open air, “clothed with the sun,” whether the sunshine be golden and direct, or dazzlingly diffused in grey.

The little figure of the London boy it is that has restored to the landscape the human colour of life.  He is allowed to come out of all his ignominies, and to take the late colour of the midsummer north-west evening, on the borders of the Serpentine.  At the stroke of eight he sheds the slough of nameless colours—­all allied to the hues of dust, soot, and fog, which are the colours the world has chosen for its boys—­and he makes, in his hundreds, a bright and delicate flush between the grey-blue water and the grey-blue sky.  Clothed now with the sun, he is crowned by-and-by with twelve stars as he goes to bathe, and the reflection of an early moon is under his feet.

So little stands between a gamin and all the dignities of Nature.  They are so quickly restored.  There seems to be nothing to do, but only a little thing to undo.  It is like the art of Eleonora Duse.  The last and most finished action of her intellect, passion, and knowledge is, as it were, the flicking away of some insignificant thing mistaken for art by other actors, some little obstacle to the way and liberty of Nature.

All the squalor is gone in a moment, kicked off with the second boot, and the child goes shouting to complete the landscape with the lacking colour of life.  You are inclined to wonder that, even undressed, he still shouts with a Cockney accent.  You half expect pure vowels and elastic syllables from his restoration, his spring, his slenderness, his brightness, and his glow.  Old ivory and wild rose in the deepening midsummer sun, he gives his colours to his world again.

It is easy to replace man, and it will take no great time, where Nature has lapsed, to replace Nature.  It is always to do, by the happily easy way of doing nothing.  The grass is always ready to grow in the streets—­and no streets could ask for a more charming finish than your green grass.  The gasometer even must fall to pieces unless it is renewed; but the grass renews itself.  There is nothing so remediable as the work of modern man—­“a thought which is also,” as Mr Pecksniff said, “very soothing.”  And by remediable I mean, of course, destructible.  As the bathing child shuffles off his garments—­they are few, and one brace suffices him—­so the land might always, in reasonable time, shuffle off its yellow brick and purple slate, and all the things that collect about railway stations.  A single night almost clears the air of London.