struck the hour of eight—not simultaneously,
for the city time-measurers are so far
behind each other, that the last chime of
eight has hardly fallen on the ear from the
last church, when another sprightly clock is
ready to commence the hour of nine. Each
clock, however, governs, and is believed in
by, its immediate neighbourhood. The lights
are turned out, one by one, in the puppet
shops. The glowing pavement before them
becomes black. The last account is balanced,
or the last item posted in the puppet ledgers.
The green shaded lamps die out, and the
puppet clerks and warehousemen join the
great human stream that is flowing rapidly
along the illuminated roads that lead to
home. The city becomes blacker and
blacker, and the twinkling suburbs seem to
glisten more brightly, as the imagination
pictures the faces of expectant wives, mothers,
daughters, and sisters, looking out to
welcome husbands, sons, fathers, and brothers,
in carriage, cab, omnibus, and coach; or, in
the person of the more humble or healthy
pedestrian.

Many of those hurrying men fly from the
city as Cain did from the murdered body of
Abel; and it would be better that they
should smite to the earth, the trusting, loving
circles of women and children that meet them
at their doors, than whisper in their ears the
dark, heavy secrets that are weighing like
lead upon their hearts.

Nine; ten; eleven by the church clocks,
and the great city, silent as death save for
the occasional rattle of a stray cab or omni-
bus with all its treasures, its precious metals
and its costly fabrics—is like one vast empty
workshop left in the charge of a few policemen,
a few porters, a few boys, and a few old
women. Its dreamers and its workers are at
rest—far away from its walls—preparing for
that never-ceasing, ever-recurring struggle
of to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow.

The moon has now increased in power;
and, acting on the mist, brings out the sur-
rounding churches, one by one. There they
stand in the soft light, a noble army of
temples thickly sprinkled amongst the
money-changers. Any taste may be suited
in structural design. There are high
churches, low churches, flat churches, broad
churches, narrow churches, square, round,
and pointed churches; churches with towers
like cubical slabs sunk deeply in between the
roofs of houses; towers like toothpicks; like
three-pronged forks; like pepper-castors; like
factory chimneys; like lime-kilns; like a
sailor's trousers hung up to dry; like bottles
of fish-sauce; and, like Saint Paul's—a balloon
turned topsy-turvy. There they stand,
like giant, spectral watchmen guarding the
silent city; whose beating heart still murmurs
in its sleep. At the hour of midnight they
proclaim with iron tongue, the advent of a
new year, mingling a song of joy with a wail
for the departed.

Shortly after midnight, a volume of smoke
bursts from the quarter of a great Southwark
brewery, dense and vast as the clouds on
which stood Polyphemus when derided by
Ulysses—stretching away in wreaths across
Saint Paul's for miles over the Hampstead
hills (a contravention of Lord Palmerston's
act in the dead of night) so sublime and
Titanic in its grandeur, that I should be
paralysed with fear if I attempted to inform
against it. Far from having any design of
the kind, I am profoundly thankful that so
much pictorial effect—as in the case of the
fog—can be got out of what is generally
treated as a nuisance.

All night long there has been little or no
rest upon the river; shouting of names, the
passage of small craft, the sound of quarrelling,
the throwing down of heavy metal
bodies, and now, at one and two o'clock, the
iron tug-boats move about, and the large
vessel at London Bridge-wharf (probably for
Hull) begins to get up her steam. The land
on the other side of the water has contributed
the sound of the railway whistle, at
intervals all through the night; with the
discharge of fog signals, or the occasional
firing of guns up to three o'clock, which
latter I can only explain upon the
supposition that some eccentric military gentleman
has chosen this mode of being awakened for
an early train.

About four o'clock I hear the hissing sound
of brooms in the streets at the base of my
watch-tower, and I gaze over at the early
puppet scavengers as they ply their sanitary
trade. Looking down upon the dark, grey
quiet roofs beneath me, they present a
strange uneven picture; like a town that
has suddenly been half swallowed up in
the earth, or a large slate-quarry, with
masses of the material lying about, in rude
plenty, in all directions. By this time
Thames Street has become a valley of fire;
and, at that gleaming corner by the Custom
House, arise the noises of the busy
Fishmarket. Towards six o'clock the twinkling
suburbs,—those red fiery stars of earth—
begin to pale, and a narrow strip of dirty
orange-coloured sky in the east, heralds the
approach of daybreak. When the lamps are
put out in the streets below, about seven
o'clock, there is, as yet, no daylight to supply
their place, and whole thoroughfares seem to
sink into the earth, bit by bit; while London
Bridge appears to be chopped away, arch by
arch, into the water. Then, a boundless sea
of light grey mist covers the housetops like
a deluge; above which the thin spires of
churches struggle upward, and you can
almost fancy you see men cling to them in
their agony, to be saved. As the dirty
orange slip in the heavens above becomes
longer, broader, and brighter, the sea of mist
gradually subsides, revealing a forest of pure
slate-white smoke, which floats and curls
from ten thousand stirring houses, awakened