In Charing Cross, where all roads meet and snarl up in the bewildering semblance of many fishing worms in a can, I ventured out into the roadway to ask a policeman the best route for reaching a place in a somewhat obscure quarter.  He threw up his arm, semaphore fashion, first to this point of the compass and then to that, and traffic halted instantly.  As far as the eye might reach it halted; and it stayed halted, too, while he searched his mind and gave me carefully and painstakingly the directions for which I sought.  In that packed mass of cabs and taxis and buses and carriages there were probably dukes and archbishops—­dukes and archbishops are always fussing about in London—­but they waited until he was through directing me.  It flattered me so that I went back to the hotel and put on a larger hat.  I sincerely hope there was at least one archbishop.

Another time we went to Paddington to take a train for somewhere.  Following the custom of the country we took along our trunks and traps on top of the taxicab.  At the moment of our arrival there were no porters handy, so a policeman on post outside the station jumped forward on the instant and helped our chauffeur to wrestle the luggage down on the bricks.  When I, rallying somewhat from the shock of this, thanked him and slipped a coin into his palm, he said in effect that, though he was obliged for the shilling, I must not feel that I had to give him anything—­that it was part of his duty to aid the public in these small matters.  I shut my eyes and tried to imagine a New York policeman doing as much for an unknown alien; but the effort gave me a severe headache.  It gave me darting pains across the top of the skull—­at about the spot where he would probably have belted me with his club had I even dared to ask him to bear a hand with my baggage.

I had a peep into the workings of the system of which the London bobby is a spoke when I went to what is the very hub of the wheel of the common law—­a police court.  I understood then what gave the policeman in the street his authority and his dignity—­and his humility—­when I saw how carefully the magistrate on the bench weighed each trifling cause and each petty case; how surely he winnowed out the small grain of truth from the gross and tare of surmise and fiction; how particular he was to give of the abundant store of his patience to any whining ragpicker or street beggar who faced him, whether as defendant at the bar, or accuser, or witness.

It was the very body of the law, though, we saw a few days after this when by invitation we witnessed the procession at the opening of the high courts.  Considered from the stand-points of picturesqueness and impressiveness it made one’s pulses tingle when those thirty or forty men of the wig and ermine marched in single and double file down the loftily vaulted hall, with the Lord Chancellor in wig and robes of state leading, and Sir Rufus Isaacs, knee-breeched