THE dirge over Vanishing London which was raised in a recent Atlantic is one which must find an echo in the heart of every London-lover. And yet in the regret over each change, the sense of loss with which we wander in the selva oscura of hoardings and scaffoldings, missing our familiar nooks and byways, do we not lose sight of London's most mysterious power? For indeed London does not vanish, but abides. By some magic of its own the great city holds inviolate through all its changes the very atmosphere of the past, subduing the stones which yesterday saw hewn and piled to a semblance of the ancientry they have invaded. It is hard, truly, to find that "London small and white and clean" of the poet's vision; but the London of Stowe's Survey - with walls yet unbroken, Holy Well running clear, and youthful citizens playing at quintain upon Cornhill-may still be seen by whoso looks for it aright. And the London of old Pepys may still be traced in scenes which would be strange enough to the quick-eyed, small-souled chronicler. Or, pacing the new embankment to-day, past the gray bulk of the Temple, one may catch the vagrant scent and defiant colors of Shakespeare's roses, Yorkist and Lancastrian, across the space of mist-veiled green. The very ground is new, reclaimed but lately from the reluc

tant river, yet all the place is touched by the sense of far-off things, till it grows harmonious with that innermost sanctuary, the round Temple Church, where the crusaders sleep in basalt.

London cannot be disinherited of its memories and its dreams; more than any other city it has the secret of holding permanent shadows amid crumbling brick and evanescent stone. Perhaps it is the fog, forever unbuilding and rebuilding, or the vague half-effacements of mist, which work the magic; or again, those mystic suffusions of light in which near and familiar outlines are blurred and some far space is etched on a molten sky, remote and dominant. Certain it is that ghosts walk unabashed in London, not only when the tragic sunsets turn one's thoughts toward Tower Hill, but in quite an accustomed and friendly fashion; and their London has not really vanished, though the Strand be a wilderness of "improvements," and Booksellers' Row a thing of the past.

Let those desirous of finding how impregnably London holds its dreams let them track those dreams through the thickest of the turmoil of change. The Strand, indeed, is laid waste; Holywell Street, dear resort of the booklover, is gone, and Wych Street with its gray, leaning gables. But, turning aside from that

highway where once grave John Evelyn stood and blessed God to see Charles II return to his own, there close at hand lies that other highway of the river, with all its freightage of dreams. Changed, indeed, is the river bank, but there, stranded and forgotten, very driftwood of the past, lifts the beautiful water-gate of York House, to whose steps no waves may wash nor any barge come gliding. The greensward is at its base in place of the green-gray water; but look for a while on the exquisite lines of it up to the curving shell which crests its archway, and the estranged river bears to those deserted steps the pomp of half-remembered pageants. Vanishing London? It is Charing Cross railway station and the embankment which vanish. Inigo Jones gate with the Villiers motto, that curious confession of faith, Fedei Coticula Crux, is real, and real no less the palace which is dust and memories, and the regal procession on the glimmering water, drawing toward these very stairs. See the tapestries brushing the current; the banners blown softly aslant; and hark, across the rush of the river and the rhythm of the oars, how the sound of music floats! One of Sedley's lightest lyrics, is it, or that dirge over "the glories of our birth and state" which the Merry Monarch loved?

Leaving that gateway into the past, it is easy, even in this new world of steam and iron, to find the ancient city, the brilliant fugitive court of other days. Tracing the highway of the Thames, that highway so abandoned, as fallen from all its statelier and more festive uses, what does it matter that the actual masonry about us is but of yesterday? Up sweeps the river mist, blurring the further bank till hospital, warehouse, what you will, is unbuilt, rebuilt to its former semblance. And the river remembers; steel-gray, steel-keen under rare winter sunlight, rippling to every nameless tint of jade, agate, and amber, touched sombrely by a sullen westering sun, it is forever the river of remembrance. And to one who glances suddenly from that current, dim

or gleaming, to the gray, imperturbable Abbey, Westminster is to-day the spot of olden triumphs and tragedies more august. The superbly assertive tower of the House of Parliament subdues itself into inconsequent harmony with the spire of St. Peter's and the solemn Hall of Judgment; its late piled stones are the inheritors of those which echoed Eliot's clarion note for freedom, and they hold the dignity of their inheritance.

It may be protested that the Thames and Westminster Hall could dominate any scene, but it is not only in such consecrated spots that London exerts her wizardry. A few turns and not many steps, and the dreamer of dreams may pass from the busy streets to space and silentness in St. James Park. They are planning a new road through the park now, are enlarging the Admiralty, and doing a number of irrelevant things. Nevertheless, St. James Park remains itself, loitering place once of kings, now of vagabonds, and always and in especial of one vagabond king. Among all the other doubtful improvements, one very desirable reinstatement has come to pass. James II has returned to the haunts which he knew so well. The noble bronze of the last Stuart king was removed from its place near Whitehall some time ago, and now it is set up between the Horse Guards and the Admiralty, looking across toward the pond. There he stands, James, by the Grace of God, King, a stately figure in his Roman armor, with an arrogant, melancholy countenance. And the strange thing is that there is no strangeness in his surroundings, though no stone remains of all that he once looked upon. At his right hand bulks the Admiralty; its red flag, with the symbolic anchor, strikes a clear note of color against the sky. James of York was a good sailor and fighter once. The world forgets it, remembering his later forlorn frustration, but the Admiralty, modern building though it is, makes a fitting background for him. Linger a while by the statue, watch the brave flash of scarlet and steel

from the Horseguards, look across the green reaches of the park: and the newness fades from stone and brick. James might step down from his pedestal and enter the Admiralty, there to confer with his cousin and fellow admiral Prince Rupert. With the thought of that valiant leader of forlorn hopes come earlier, more tragic memories. Across St. James Park the White King walked to his death. But the statue and the park belong to the Restoration, and so characteristically put aside those darker visions. The Admiralty, doubtless, is concerned about the Dutch war: it was of Rupert's victory, not James's, that Dryden wrote those sounding lines which tell how

"Their navy still a stiff stretched cord did show, Till you bore in and bent them into flight." A fine tense image of strife.

But the soldiers and their work keep somewhat disdainfully in the background. In the foreground,-why, the trim walks and green spaces would even now make a fair setting for those seekers of pleasure of whom Pepys and Grammont wrote. Yonder whisks my Lady Castlemaine's much bepraised lace petticoat; and there by the pond leans the black-a-vized gentleman with the sardonic smile, Charles II himself. Most companionable of ghosts is the Merry Monarch, not averse from passing light comments on men and things as he tosses bread to his waterfowl. The waterfowl are still there in actual fact, lineal descendants, it is claimed, of the king's pets, and help more than the bronze statue to hold past and present together. The fleets of Rupert and James of York sail no more the narrow seas; the dynasty which they served is no less driftwood; the vane of Whitehall has been set two centuries and more to the "protestant wind" which wafted William to England and James from his throne. But London preserves its essentials. King Charles's waterfowl quack and gobble happily in the pond, and James Stuart looks toward them from his pedestal. Charles himself could not hit on a comment more ironic.

But not alone in palace and pleasaunce does London hold itself inviolable. Out beyond the Horseguards lies the great Square of the Column, and Charles I rides in bronze on the spot where once the Regicides sealed the "good cause" with atoning blood. The royal statue and Nelson's column must settle matters as they can with the church, St. Martin'sin-the-Fields, whose name babbles o' green fields indeed, and conjures back the time when wild roses grew along the Strand. Modern of moderns is Trafalgar Square, modern as the poet Henley who sang its praises; its swiftly passing crowds, its traffic, its quick stir of immediate interests, all glance by, as much things of the moment as the flashing drops of its fountains. And yet there are hours of twilight or of sunset haze when the great square grows remote and visionary, and there seems nothing anachronistic in the wreaths which latter-day Loyalists place beneath the king's statue, as if in homage to a wrong and grief still fresh. And if Stuart London still abides in vanishing, - and let none doubt it who has ever recreated a bygone society from the sight of one link-holder in St. James Square, even more tenacious is that elder London of priest and knight and burgess which holds its fastness in the city. Business enterprise may cut new streets and pile one story on another, but nothing serves to efface the "dread endearing stain of time," or to obliterate that little ancient town whose walls and gates and treasured fountains Stowe counts over with civic pride. In any keener air, in any light less lingering and reminiscent, the distinction between old and new would be sharply marked, and London's contrasts would not resolve themselves into harmony. As it is, the smoke with which we are all so fain to quarrel touches the new stones into delicate accord with the ancient buildings, and the sun-shot haze or spectral grayness which softens every vista is the right medium for ghost-seeing. Judged by harsh fact, Shoe Lane is irretrievably modernized,

not like Fetter Lane, which still boasts its jutting gables, but the dingy street declines to forego its antiquity to such purpose that the gallant, forlorn figure of the chivalric poet Lovelace may even now be seen, irrelevant and debonair, beneath the office of the Standard.

"Stone walls do not a prison make," sang Lovelace, nor does the crumbling of stone walls unmake the citadel of our memories. And so to this day Whitefriars is Whitefrairs, the Alsatia of old disreputable days, though the cutpurses have given place to journalists, and the tiny red danger flags against the grimy walls mean only that the passerby is like to be crushed by a falling bale of paper.

Beyond Whitefriars the Temple- But there, indeed, no spoiler has come, and the past is unperturbed among those echoing courts, where time passes but that it may be measured on their many sundials, and makes no other record. In the city's self what pressure of immediate life, what grapple of contending interests; and yet a stillness below the tumult, a reverie unbroken by all the crash and grind of business life which has yoked Kipling's Winds of the World. As one threads the narrow lanes or crowded streets the old life is at every turn, a scar on the stones, perhaps, an ancient name from which the significance has half slipped. Rood Lane, which lifts no more its sanctifying cross, or Panyer Alley, forsaken of its basket weavers. Always it is there, potent, subduing, and the new buildings take on by its grace a seeming of antiquity. So little is needed to keep that dim, indomitable past bodily with us to-day: the glimpse of a church, say the flowerlike curve of St. Dunstan's portal, or St. Helen's cloistral in its square of green, hinting at the sanctuary of quiet within, where sleep citizens in flowing robe and civic chain, venturers who have made the great ultimate discovery, and warriors, their gauntleted hands long estranged from the swordhilt. Or is it, instead, the hall of one of the city guilds, or of the great trading companies which have borne

seas ?

England's empire to the seven Much, truly, is gone of that London which was praised as "the supreme City of the whole Land, Mother of Authenticke Memory; yes, the very Chamber Royall for Majestie itself and the open Haven for all Merchandise and Commerce, as being the rich Store-house of Peace and Plentie." Yes, but the authenticke memory abides. Is the cornmarket gone from Cornhill, and the giant maypole laid low this many a May day? Yet there St. Andrews Understaft, old Stowe, yet poises his quill, unchanged in a changing world.

Mourners over vanishing London, come sup in a true old coffee-house in Change Alley, rebuilt from cellar to roof, yet low-ceiled, wide-windowed, decorated with antiquated plans, served by traditional waiters, and looking straight into-no, not into Lloyd's Shipping office, but across to the vanished "Garroways," where perhaps the founders of the Hudson Bay Company are met to witness the first auction of furs. And then,—why, where you will, and in whose company you choose. Cowley, "irrecoverably a poet," may come from reading the Faerie Queene to be your guide, or Gower from where he sleeps in St. Saviour's, his beloved books beneath his head. Or if you choose rather a man of substance, why then stout John Philpotts, or Sir Thomas Gresham, or another of the merchant princes who wrought the greatness of their merchant city. In any case be assured your companion will find his London within your own, shorn, though it may be, of pageants, festive and tragic, and whelmed in the monotonous immensity of the latter-day city. So, in the end, you may learn to see it no less; present, unassailable through all changes; a London builded in part of actual and ancient stone, solid as that mighty Tudor gateway of Lincoln's Inn or the fretted front of Crosby Hall, in part of suggestions and memories, transitory as the wheeling glint of the doves' wings which brush the stone in passing. And that London does not vanish, but abides.

AGES before the birth of the first wheelwright, some prehistoric innovator bound his burden upon a captive ass, while himself went straight-backed and free. The pack-mule, or "sumpter mule" of history, belongs to those times when roads were paths and weapons bows. The flight of time has done for him what it has done for these other things, so that now, except in odd corners where primitive survivals are still found, he is practically extinct.

And yet, to certain of us, perhaps because of ourselves having a primitive turn, and so a natural sympathy for such survivals, this pack-mule has interest, even charm. I, myself, am but an amateur of mules, - a man who, in a few mountain rambles, has developed an interest still lively and not yet dulled by satiety of its object. But experiences that are not long may yet be deep; and at times, when farpenetrating the primeval wilderness, alone with his little bags of food, his conscience and his mule, life is concentrated.

To the majority of the human race a pack-saddle would prove both curious and mysterious. Its form nowise announces its use, its first appearance being that of a small sawbuck entangled among old harness.

To pack, half your stuff on either side of him. If

tie your beast and load

one side is heavier his back will get sore. Under the saddle place something soft, porous, and without wrinkles. The little sawbuck set astride his spine you fasten by a broad belly-band called a "cinchbelt." The mule will not like it, but you ignore that. For rough mountaineering we use a breech-strap and breast-band. A second cinch-belt may be placed back of the first. This allows milder cinching, notwithstanding which he especially resents the second belt. You continue to ignore his resentment.

Pack freight with common sense. Neither eggs and ironware, nor paper bags and sharp-cornered boxes go well together. Nor must the load chuck and rattle. Absolute compactness, that will endure to the journey's end, is the aim. The terrible jerking, jerking, jerking that a load gets is far greater than any mortal appreciates until he ropes a pack of assorted valuables to resist it. The load shrinks, the ropes loosen, and then, if not speedily fixed, catastrophe.

--

The cinching amazes the tenderfoot. The rope, playing round the cinch-hook, is a power-multiplying device that will pull the belt as tight as you choose, regardless of the size of the mule, - - and you do choose. Deaf to his protests you tighten ever tighter, until he humps up and puffs out, at which, bracing your foot against his side, you again tighten viciously. When his third rib cracks, make fast. The mule grunts, but soon goes off nibbling the herbage.

With good packing, after the first stop to retighten cinches, which, with some kinds of loads, is quite unavoidable, you go through any country whatever and so does the mule. At night all is found as it was in the morning. Not a hair has left the mule's back; nor are there any places that hurt him when you poke them with your thumb. Still, even so, it is well to wash his back with cold water.

Sometimes, enticed by the beauty of his sleek wetness, I have been led on to bathe him all over, rejoicing in his bronzelike shine. To a mule, however, all water is an abomination; wherefore my bronze statue generally walked direct to the nearest dust-hole and therein wallowed plentifully upon his back. In some of these respects the mule is a little disappointing.

Packing, however, is but the preface;