Sometimes We Sally Forth In Search Of Adventures In The Thick Of A
'London Particular,' Mr. Guppy's Phrase For A Fog.
When you are
once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering
through a world of
Bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey,
dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then
disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily
upon your head, and the air is full of a kind of luminous yellow
smoke.
A Lipton's Tea 'bus is the only one we can see plainly in this sort
of weather, and so we always take it. I do not wish, however, to be
followed literally in these modest suggestions for omnibus rides,
because I am well aware that they are not sufficiently specific for
the ordinary tourist who wishes to see London systematically and
without any loss of time. If you care to go to any particular
place, or reach that place by any particular time, you must not, of
course, look at the most conspicuous signs on the tops and ends of
the chariots as we do; you must stand quietly at one of the regular
points of departure and try to decipher, in a narrow horizontal
space along the side, certain little words that show the route and
destination of the vehicle. They say that it can be done, and I do
not feel like denying it on my own responsibility. Old Londoners
assert that they are not blinded or confused by Pears' Soap in
letters two feet high, scarlet on a gold ground, but can see below
in fine print, and with the naked eye, such legends as Tottenham
Court Road, Westbourne Grove, St. Pancras, Paddington, or Victoria.
It is certainly reasonable that the omnibuses should be decorated to
suit the inhabitants of the place rather than foreigners, and it is
perhaps better to carry a few hundred stupid souls to the wrong
station daily than to allow them to cleanse their hands with the
wrong soap, or quench their thirst with the wrong (which is to say
the unadvertised) beverage.
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