The funny thing is that there is plenty of good light, only they don’t know how to apply it.  Every night, directly it begins to be dark, great streams of light are turned on from all parts of the city; but would you believe it, they are directed, not downwards so that they could illumine the street, but upwards into the empty sky!  If the Chairman of our District Council could see this, how he would laugh!  I wish you would tell him.

Then there is coal.  I went, as we arranged, first to the Jerusalem Hotel, but it was like ice.  When I asked the hotel people why the central heating was not on, they said that there is no coal.  At least it seems that there is coal, but no one to deliver it.  Just think of our coal-merchant returning such a reply to us when the cellar was getting empty.  But in London they seem to be ready to put up with any excuse.  Why the men who ought to deliver the coals are not made to, I can’t imagine.  Anyhow, as I was freezing, I moved into lodgings, where there is coal, although an exorbitant price is asked for each scuttle.

The great topic of conversation everywhere has been some new speculation called the War Loan, and I have to confess that as it is so well spoken of and is to pay the large dividend of 5-1/4 per cent.  I have arranged to invest something for each of us in it.  I don’t know who the promoter—­a Mr. BONAR LAW—­is, but it would be awful for us if he turned out to be a JABEZ BALFOUR in disguise.  Still, nearly all investment is a gamble, and we can only hope for the best.  He must have some peculiar position or the papers would not support his venture as they do; and there is even a campaign of public speakers through the country, I am told, taking his prospectus as their text and literally imploring the people to invest.  Quite like the South Sea Bubble we read of in MACAULAY; but please Heaven it won’t turn out to be another.

I asked the landlady here about it, but she knew nothing, except that her family could not afford to put anything in.  “But your daughters earn very good money,” I said.  “That’s true,” she replied, “but all that they have over after their clothes, poor girls, they spend on the theatre or the pictures; and I’m glad to think they can do so.  I wouldn’t grudge them their pleasures, not I.”

Judging by the crowded state of all the myriad places of entertainment in this city there are millions who are like them.  But I couldn’t help thinking that if so much money seems really to be needed, and this Mr. LAW is really a public benefactor, it might not be a bad idea to try to divert some of the thousands of pounds being paid every day in London alone for sheer amusement.  Of course if England had the misfortune to be at war most of these places would naturally be shut up.

By the way, Germans are strangely unpopular in London just now.  I have heard numbers of people, all in different places, such as the Tube and omni-buses and tea-shops, using very strong terms about them.  It has been quite a series of coincidences.