The city in the sea

One dry bright morning in early September, Robert Lestrange left his rooms in Cadogan Street, and, boarding a bus bound for Charing Cross climbed on to the roof.

Robert was good to look at, though as a matter of fact he was not particularly good-looking, but he was young, well dressed, well groomed and clean, innocent-seeming and light-hearted; a person one might fancy most engaging to the eyes of girls and confidence trick men.

At Charing Cross he dropped off the bus and took his way along the south side of the Strand, walking in a leisurely manner and absorbing the details around him.

The Strand is much more than a street. It is the life of many nations, the activities of many men; the past and present all made visible and audible. In the Strand walk Henry Irving and Toole, no less surely than Berry and Godfrey Tearle; Disraeli no less living than Baldwin. It is an extension of the Bund of Nagasaki, and an earthquake in San Francisco tells of itself here an hour after the event.

It has also some of the most delightful shops in the world. The shop, for instance, where the sporting guns and rifles are arranged for view and where the big game and the trees of the jungle show shadowlike behind the express rifles.