"I could go on like that without having been outside England at all.
I should say:
"I have smoked my fourpenny shag in the sanded bars of Fleet Street,
and I have puffed my twopenny Manilla in the gilded balls of the
Criterion; I have quaffed my foaming beer of Burton where
Islington's famed Angel gathers the little thirsty ones beneath her
shadowing wings, and I have sipped my tenpenny ordinaire in many a
garlic-scented salon of Soho. On the back of the strangely-moving
ass I have urged - or, to speak more correctly, the proprietor of the
ass, or his agent, from behind has urged - my wild career across the
sandy heaths of Hampstead, and my canoe has startled the screaming
wild-fowl from their lonely haunts amid the sub-tropical regions of
Battersea. Adown the long, steep slope of One Tree Hill have I
rolled from top to foot, while laughing maidens of the East stood
round and clapped their hands and yelled; and, in the old-world
garden of that pleasant Court, where played the fair-haired children
of the ill-starred Stuarts, have I wandered long through many paths,
my arm entwined about the waist of one of Eve's sweet daughters,
while her mother raged around indignantly on the other side of the
hedge, and never seemed to get any nearer to us. I have chased the
lodging-house Norfolk Howard to his watery death by the pale lamp's
light; I have, shivering, followed the leaping flea o'er many a mile
of pillow and sheet, by the great Atlantic's margin. Round and
round, till the heart - and not only the heart - grows sick, and the
mad brain whirls and reels, have I ridden the small, but extremely
hard, horse, that may, for a penny, be mounted amid the plains of
Peckham Rye; and high above the heads of the giddy throngs of Barnet
(though it is doubtful if anyone among them was half so giddy as was
I) have I swung in highly-coloured car, worked by a man with a rope.
I have trod in stately measure the floor of Kensington's Town Hall
(the tickets were a guinea each, and included refreshments - when you
could get to them through the crowd), and on the green sward of the
forest that borders eastern Anglia by the oft-sung town of Epping I
have performed quaint ceremonies in a ring; I have mingled with the
teeming hordes of Drury Lane on Boxing Night, and, during the run of
a high-class piece, I have sat in lonely grandeur in the front row
of the gallery, and wished that I had spent my shilling instead in
the Oriental halls of the Alhambra."
"There you are," said B., "that is just as good as yours; and you
can write like that without going more than a few hours' journey
from London."
"We will discuss the matter no further," I replied. "You cannot, I
see, enter into my feelings.
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