to him that there are so many of every sort of thing in the world, just as, sooner or later, it will come home to him that there are so very many others of as little import in the scale of things as the catapult seller, the green fields,—and as himself.
For, sooner or later, the sense of the impersonality, of the abstraction that London is, will become one of the most intimate factors of his daily life. And sooner rather than later it will become one for the young provincial.
He will have had his preconceptions: he will have seen photographs of "bits", of buildings, of bridges. He will have had his vague idea of a bulbous domed St. Paul's with a queer fragment of Ludgate Hill, standing isolated at a corner of the Green Park; of Nelson's Column and the Monument, of the Houses of Parliament and Buckingham Palace—all hazily united into one "view" by a river Thames that is hazily suggested, green and leafy, by his own Severn, his own Stour, his own Ouse, or Adur. But this picture will vanish finally and irrecoverably, like our own preconceived notions of an individual we have long thought of, whom we meet at last to find so entirely—and so very obviously—different.
The emotions of his journey to town—and they are emotions from within so much more than impressions from without—will last him until he is settled, more or less, for good in his lodgings, his cellar or his boarding house. They will last him, at least until his things are unpacked, his credentials presented, his place found—
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