FROM A DISTANCE
hole, his own string that in a noisome cellar pulls the latch, or his own bundle of rags in the corner of a railway arch. Daily details will have merged, as it were, into his bodily functions, and will have ceased to distract his attention. He will have got over the habit of relying, in these things, upon personal contacts. He will have acquired an alertness of eye that will save him from asking his way. On his "Underground" he will glance at a board rather than inquire of a porter; on 'bus-routes he will catch instinctively, on the advancing and shapeless mass of colour and trade announcements, the small names of taverns, of Crosses, of what were once outlying hamlets; he will have in his mind a rough sketch map of that plot of London that by right of living in he will make his own. Then he will be the Londoner, and to the measure of the light vouchsafed will know his London. Yet, to the great majority of Londoners whose residence is not an arrière boutique London will remain a matter of a central highway, a central tunnel or a central conduit, more or less long; a daily route whose two extremities are a more or less permanent sleeping place, and a more or less permanent workshop—a thing, figured on a map, like the bolas of certain South Americans, a long cord with balls at the extremities. At the one there will gradually congregate the parts of a home, at the other, the more or less familiar, more or less hypnotising, more or less congenial, surroundings of his daily work. It will be a matter of a daily life passing unnoticed.
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