NIGHTS IN LONDON "Hundreds of books have been written about London, but few are as well worth reading as this."— London Times. "Thomas Burke writes of London as Kipling wrote of India."— Baltimore Sun. "A real book."— New York Sun. 4th printing, $1.50 HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS       NEW YORK OUT AND ABOUT LONDON BY THOMAS BURKE AUTHOR OF "LIMEHOUSE NIGHTS" AND "NIGHTS IN LONDON" NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1919 Copyright , 1919 BY HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY...

It was a lucid, rain-washed morning—one of those rare mornings when London seems to laugh before you, disclosing her random beauties. In every park the trees were hung with adolescent tresses, green and white and yellow, and the sky was busy with scudding clouds. Even the solemn bricks had caught something of the sudden colour of the day, and London seemed to toss in its long, winter sleep and to take the heavy breaths of the awakening sluggard. I turned from my Fleet Street window to my desk, t

From my earliest perceiving moments, docks and railway stations have been, for me, the most romantic spots of the city in which I was born and bred. Quays and wharves, cuts, basins, reaches, steel tracks and passenger trains, and all that belonged to the life of the waterside and the railway, spoke to me of illimitable travel and distant, therefore desirable, things. This feeling I share, I suppose, with millions of other men and children who have been reared in coast cities, and whose minds res

"Chinatown, my Chinatown, where the lights are low"—a fragment of a music-hall song in praise of Chinatown which sticks ironically in my memory. The fact that the lights are low applies at the time of writing to the whole of London; and as for the word "Chinatown," which once carried a perfume of delight, it is now empty of meaning save as indicating a district of London where Chinamen live. To-day Limehouse is without salt or savour; flat and unprofitable; and of all that it once held of colour

Soho! Soho! Joyous syllables, in early times expressive of the delights of the chase, and even to-day carrying an echo of nights of festivity, though an echo only. How many thousand of provincials, seeing London, have been drawn to those odourous byways that thrust themselves so briskly through the staid pleasure-land of the West End—Greek Street, Frith Street, Dean Street, Old Compton Street: a series of interjections breaking a dull paragraph—where they might catch the true Latin temper and be

It was an empty day, in the early part of the year, and I was its very idle singer; so idle that I was beginning to wonder whether there would be any Sunday dinner for me. I took stock of my possessions in coin, and found one-and-ten-pence-halfpenny. Was I downhearted? Yes. But I didn't worry, for when things are at their worst, my habit is always to fold my hands and trust. Something always happens. Something happened on this occasion: a double knock at the door and a telegram. It was from the

I have been looking for a needle in a haystack, and I have not found it. I have been looking for an hour's true entertainment in London's theatres and music-halls during this spring season of 1918. The tag of Mr. Gus Elen's old song, "'E dunno where 'e are," very aptly describes the condition of the regular theatre-goer to-day. What would the old laddies of the Bodega-cheese days have thought, had any prophesied that at one swift step the Oxford and the Pavilion would simultaneously move into th

Last year London lost two of its quaintest characters—Robertson, of Australia, that pathetic old man who haunted the Strand and carried in his hat a clumsily scrawled card announcing that he was searching for his errant daughter, and "Please Do Not Give Me Money"; and "Spring Onions," the Thames Police Court poet. Now the race of London freaks seems ended. Craig, the poet of the Oval Cricket ground; Spiv Bagster; the Chiswick miser; Onions and Robertson; all are gone. Hunnable is confined; and G

"I'll learn yeh, y' little wretch!" "Oowh! Don't—don't!" The lady, savagely wielding a decayed carpet-beater, bent over the shrinking form of the child—a little storm of short skirts and black hair. Her arm ached and her face steamed, but she continued to shower blows wherever she could get them in, until suddenly the storm limply subsided into a small figure which doubled up and fell. A step sounded in the doorway, and the lady looked up, frayed at the edges and panting. A small, slight man, in

What does the Cockney's mind first register when, far from home, he visualizes the London that he loves with the casual devotion of his type? To the serious tourist London is the shrine of England's history; to the ordinary artist, who sees life in line and colour, it is a city of noble or delicate "bits"; to the provincial it is a playground; to the business man a market; but to the Cockney it is one big club, odourous of the goodly fellowship that blossoms from contact with human-kind. "Far fr

The origins of Saturday night, as a social institution, are obscure. No doubt a little research would discover them to the earnest seeker, but I am temperamentally averse from anything like research. It is tedious in process and disappointing in result. Successful research means grasping at the reality and dropping the romance. The outstanding fact about Saturday night is that it is an exclusively British institution. Neither America nor the Continent knows its precious joys. It is one of the fe

Although London possesses a thousand central points suitable for a street rendezvous, Londoners seem to have decided by tacit agreement to use only five of these for their outdoor appointments. They are: Charing Cross Post Office, Leicester Square Tube, Piccadilly Tube, under the Clock at Victoria, and Oxford Circus Tube; and I have never known my friends telephone me for a meeting and fix a rendezvous outside this list. Indeed, I can now, by long experience, place the habits and character of ca

The Cockney is popularly supposed to stand for the fixed type of the blasphemous and the cynical in his speech and attitude to life. He is supposed to jump with hobnailed boots on all things and institutions that are, to others, sacred. He is supposed to admit no solemnities, no traditional rites or services, to the big moments of life. This is wrong. The Cockney's attitude to life is perhaps more solemn than that of any other social type, save when he is one of a crowd of his fellows; and then

When everything in your little world goes wrong; when you can do nothing right; when you have cut yourself while shaving, and it has rained all day, and the taxis have splashed your collar with mud, and you receive an Army notice, post-marked on the outer covering Buy National War Bonds Now —in short, when you are fed up, what do you do? To each man his own remedy. I know one man who, in such circumstances, goes to bed and reads Ecclesiastes; another who goes on an evening jag; another who goes

The turning-out of the crowded drawers of an old bureau or cabinet is universally known as the prime pastime of the faded spinster; a pastime in which the starved spirit may exercise itself among delicious melancholies and wraiths of spent joys. Well, I am not yet faded, and I am not a spinster; but I have fallen to the lure of "turning out." I have lately "turned out"—not the musty souvenirs of fifty years ago, love, fifty years ago, but the still warm fragments of A.D. 1912. The other day, whi

On a bright afternoon of last summer I suffered all the thrills described in the sestet of Keats's sonnet, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." I discovered a new art-form. I felt like that watcher of the skies. I stood upon a peak in Darien. But I was not silent, for what I had discovered was the game of baseball, and—incidentally—the soul of America. That match between the American Army and Navy teams was my first glimpse of a pastime that has captivated a continent. I can well understand