1. N.H.C

       Table of Contents

      It was a bad night in London, not wild or turbulent, but swathed to the eyes like an Eastern woman in a soft grey garment of fog. It engulfed the walled canyons of the city through which the traffic had roared all day, plugged up the maze of dark side streets, and blotted out the open squares. Close to the ground it was thick, viscous, impenetrable, so that one could not see a yard ahead, and walked ghostlike, adventuring into a strange world.

      Occasionally it dispersed. In front of the opera house, numbers of arc-lights wrought a wavering mist-hung yellow square, into which a constant line of vehicles like monstrous shiny bugs emerged from the outer nowhere, disgorged their contents, and eclipsed again. And pedestrians in gay processional streamed across the ruddy glistening patch like figures on a slide.

      Conspicuous in the shifting throng was a boy, ostensibly selling violets, but with a keen eye upon the arriving vehicles. Suddenly he darted to the curb, where