One morning as I was walking at random through the aristocratic
district, of which St. James is the solar plexus and Park Lane
the spinal cord, I came to a big mansion where foot-guards stood
sentry at the wall gates. This house was further distinguished
from its neighbors by the presence of a policeman pacing alongside
it, and a newspaper photographer setting up his tripod and camera
in the road, and a small knot of passers-by lingering on the
opposite side of the way, as though waiting for somebody to come
along or something to happen. I waited too. In a minute a handsome
old man and a well-set-up young man turned the corner afoot. The
younger man was leading a beautiful stag hound. The photographer
touched his hat and said something, and the younger man smiling a
good-natured smile, obligingly posed in the street for a picture.
At this precise moment a dirigible balloon came careening over
the chimneypots on a cross-London air jaunt; and at the sight of
it the little crowd left the young man and the photographer and
set off at a run to follow, as far as they might, the course of
the balloon. Now in America this could not have occurred, for the
balloon man would not have been aloft at such an hour. He would
have been on the earth; moreover he would have been outside the
walls of that mansion house, along with half a million, more or
less, of his patriotic fellow countrymen, tearing his own clothes
off and their clothes off, trampling the weak and sickly underfoot,
bucking the doubled and tripled police lines in a mad, vain effort
to see the flagpole on the roof or a corner of the rear garden
wall.
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