The street venders do not bray on noisy trumpets or ring with bells or utter loud cries to advertise their wares.  The policeman does not shout his orders out; he holds aloft the stripe-sleeved arm of authority and all London obeys.  I think the reason why the Londoners turned so viciously on the suffragettes was not because of the things the suffragettes clamored for, but because they clamored for them so loudly.  They jarred the public peace—­that must have been it.

I can understand why an adult American might go to Paris and stay in Paris and be satisfied with Paris, if he were a lover of art and millinery in all their branches; or why he might go to Berlin if he were studying music and municipal control; or to Amsterdam if he cared for cleanliness and new cheese; or to Vienna if he were concerned with surgery, light opera, and the effect on the human lungs of doing without fresh air for long periods of time; or to Rome if he were an antiquarian and interested in ancient life; or to Naples if he were an entomologist and interested in insect life; or to Venice if he liked ruins with water round them; or to Padua if he liked ruins with no water anywhere near them.  No:  I’m blessed if I can think of a single good reason why a sane man should go to Padua if he could go anywhere else.

But I think I know, good and well, why a man might spend his whole vacation in London and enjoy every minute of it.  For this old fogy, old foggy town of London is a man-sized town, and a man-run town; and it has a fascination of its own that is as much a part of it as London’s grime is; or London’s vastness and London’s pettiness; or London’s wealth and its stark poverty; or its atrocious suburbs; or its dirty, trade-fretted river; or its dismal back streets; or its still more dismal slums—­or anything that is London’s.

To a man hailing from a land where everything is so new that quite a good deal of it has not even happened yet, it is a joyful thing to turn off a main-traveled road into one of the crooked byways in which the older parts of London abound, and suddenly to come, full face, on a house or a court or a pump which figured in epochal history or epochal literature of the English-speaking race.  It is a still greater joy to find it—­house or court or pump or what not—­looking now pretty much as it must have looked when good Queen Bess, or little Dick Whittington, or Chaucer the scribe, or Shakspere the player, came this way.  It is fine to be riding through the country and pass a peaceful green meadow and inquire its name of your driver and be told, most offhandedly, that it is a place called Runnymede.  Each time this happened to me I felt the thrill of a discoverer; as though I had been the first traveler to find these spots.