08 Victorian London

Full transcript

Before we begin, let the room around you settle, lower the lights, if they are not low already, and let your head rest heavy against whatever is holding it, and let your hands lie wherever they have fallen. There is nothing you need to keep track of tonight. There is no thread to follow and nothing to remember in the morning. If your thoughts drift away from my voice while I am speaking, let them drift. They will come back on their own, or they will not, and either way is exactly right. My voice will still be here, moving slowly through one ordinary evening in a very old city, and you can walk beside it for as long as you like, and then fall behind it into sleep whenever sleep comes to fetch you. That is the whole arrangement between us. That is all tonight is for. Tonight we are going to spend an evening and a night in London, in the deep heart of the 1880s, and before we set out, I want to tell you what kind of evening it is going to be, so that you can set down every other kind. Nothing is going to happen tonight.

There is no story coming. No one we meet will need anything from us, and nothing anywhere in this great city will require our attention or our worry. It is a plain working Tuesday at the end of October, an evening exactly like a thousand evenings before it and a thousand after. The kind of evening that never once made it into a book, because all anyone did was finish the day, walk home, eat supper, sit by the fire and go to bed. Those unrecorded evenings are the true substance of every life that has ever been lived, and one of them is waiting for us now, down a quiet side street, behind a door with a brass number on it, where a fire is already laid.

So breathe out, all the way out, and let this day of yours go out with the breath, and come with me into the last hour of the light. It is late afternoon sliding into evening, and you are walking home. The day's work is behind you, wherever it was, in some warm office of ledges and ink, or behind a counter, or at a workbench. It does not matter now, because it is finished, and the finishing of it has left you with that particular tiredness that is nine parts contentment, the tiredness that asks nothing except supper and a chair, and, in its own time, a bed.

The city is letting go of the day all around you. The light is going down through a sky of soft, cold grey and rose, the sun somewhere behind the rooftops to the west, sunk into its own gentle haze, and the air is turning cold in the slow, clean way of late October, cold enough to make you glad of your coat, not cold enough yet to hurry anyone. And the air smells of London, which is a smell like no other city before or since, and not, on an evening like this, an unpleasant one. It is coal smoke, first and always, the smoke of half a million hearth fires newly lit for the evening, drifting up from half a million chimney pots into the still air, and settling back over the streets like a soft grey blanket being drawn up for the night.

Under the smoke there is the smell of the horses, warm and grassy and everywhere, and the smell of wet stone where the crossing-sweeper has been at his work, and threads of other things as you pass them, roasting chestnuts from a brazier at the corner, vinegar and warm paper from the fried fish shop, oranges from a barrow, tobacco from a doorway, and Beneath it all, faint and wide, the cold river smell of the Thames, which reaches everywhere in this city, the way the sound of the sea reaches every room of a house on the shore.

Listen to it, this city at the day's end. It is never silent London, but at this hour its great noise begins to soften and come apart into separate sounds, each one rounder and kinder than it was at noon. The iron ring of hooves on the main road behind you, unhurried now, cab horses walking home, the grind and hiss of wheels on granite sets, a muffin man's bell somewhere two streets off, rung slow, and his long call floating after it, muffins, all hot, and the words worn so smooth by years of calling that they are hardly words anymore, only a shape of sound that means evening.

A train somewhere below and away, a long low rumble under the world, felt in the pavement more than heard, gone again. Newsboys calling the evening editions at the corner, their voices already hoarse and easy, past urgency. And under everything, that great low-breathing hum that London makes and has always made, the sound of a million small doings folded together, too many and too far to name. A sound you stop hearing after a week of living here, and tonight you may let it be what it truly is, which is the sound of company.

You are one of millions settling towards sleep tonight, and every one of them is a stranger, and every one of them is somehow yours. The pavement carries you along the main road for a little while yet, past the bright shop fronts making their last hour of business. The gas is lit in all the windows now, and each shop lays its own warm oblong of light across the paving stones, so that you walk through light and shadow, light and shadow, the way you might walk through the bars of sun in a winter wood.

The draper's window is a soft glowing wall of folded woolen flannel. Bolts of cloth stood on end like books on a giant's shelf, and the draper himself is in the doorway in his black coat, hands behind his back, watching the street with the mild satisfied look of a man whose day has gone well enough. The chemist's window glows red and green and gold from the great glass carboys of coloured water that chemists have set in their windows time out of mind, and the light through them lies on the wet pavement in long stained ribbons.

The stationer is turning down his gas already, moving along the counter with a taper, leaving one jet burning at the back. The grocer's boy is carrying in the baskets of onions and apples that stood all day on the pavement, and the smell of the shop follows him out through the open door, tea and bacon and candle wax and sawdust, one of the good smells of the world. And the grocer is weighing out the last quarter pound of tea for a woman with a basket on her arm. And the little brass weights click against the pan, and the gas jet purrs above them both, and nobody in the whole shop is hurrying.

At the corner the chestnut man stands over his glowing brazier, turning the chestnuts with a small worn shovel, and the charcoal light comes up under his chin and makes him look carved out of oak, and the smell is enormous and sweet and a little burnt, and men stopping home from work hold out their pennies and carry the hot paper twists away inside their coats against their chests, like small private sons. You could stop too. There is time. There is nothing but time tonight. The chestnuts are hot and flowery and sweet, and the first one burns your fingers a little through your gloves, the small good burning that belongs to winter evenings and to nothing else, and you eat it slowly as you turn off the main road at last, away from the shops and the light and the traffic, into the quieter streets where the evening is already further along, and where your own street is waiting three turnings away.

And now the city changes around you, gently, block by block, the way water stills as you walk upstream from a weir. The buildings come down from four storeys to two and three. The shop fronts give way to house fronts, long terraces of brick, plain and dark and regular, each with its area railing and its stone step and its fan light over the door. behind the fanlights, one by one, the lights are coming on. The traffic sound falls away behind you until it is only that soft, distant sea roar again, and in its place come the small sounds of residential evening. A door knocked, a door answered, a kettle somewhere beginning, coal being got in from a coal hole with a rush and rattle, and the clang of the iron plate dropped back into the pavement. A piano through a curtained window, someone practicing the same eight bars over and over, patiently, getting them a little more right each time, and the slow scrape and ring of a shutter being fastened. Somewhere a gate creaks and clicks. Somewhere a small dog states its position once and is satisfied. The fog is beginning now, just the first of it, a soft gauze coming up from the direction of the river, not the thick yellow fog of deep winter, but the mild pearly kind that only makes every gas lamp kinder, giving each flame its own globe of haze so that the lamps down the street stand in a row like a string of misted moons, growing smaller and fainter until the furthest is only a suggestion of light, a promise that the street goes on.

There is no hurry here. Stop a moment at the top of your street, under the first lamp, and simply look down the length of it, because a street seen slowly is a street seen well, and this one is yours. It is a street of small brick houses, two stories and a basement kitchen built altogether some forty years ago, and settled since then into that comfortable middle age that brick comes to in London. The yellow stock brick, gone soft brown and grey with smoke, so that the whole terrace has the colour of an old book. The houses stand shoulder to shoulder, each one the same as its neighbours, and each one, if you look slowly, entirely itself. This This one has white painted window boxes, with the last of the year's geraniums holding on.

That one has a green door, instead of a black one, and a knocker in the shape of a hand. Further down, a house has its shutters already closed for the night, with the lamp light leaking through the heart-shaped holes cut in the panels, two small hearts of light hanging in the dark front of the house. The area railings run along the whole terrace in an iron hedge, and below them down the narrow stone steps, the basement kitchens are lit and busy, and their light comes up through the railings and lies in long ladders across the pavement.

You can hear, as you pass each area, the sounds of each kitchen rising up. A pan, a pump handle, a woman's voice singing half a song, plates being stacked, and you You can smell each supper as you pass it, chops here, bacon there, at the next house something baking, and at the corner house onions and gravy, and every one of those suppers is somebody's whole evening, and not one of them needs anything from you at all. The lamplighter is working his way up the other side of the street, and let us slow our steps to keep pace with him a while, because there is no lovelier work to watch at this hour.

He is a long thin unhurried man with his long thin pole over his shoulder, and he goes from lamp to lamp with the steady gait of a man who has walked this same round every evening for twenty years, and will walk it every evening for twenty more, and at each iron column he He stops, and tilts the pole up through the little door of the lantern, and turns the tap with the brass tip of it, and touches the pilot flame to the jet, and the lamp wakes. That is the only word for it. A soft pop, and then the flame settles and steadies and spreads its light around itself, like a cat arranging itself to sleep, and the lamp lighter is already moving on, leaving behind him a lengthening string of lit lamps, each with its halo of young fog, and the dusk between them growing bluer and deeper by contrast.

Children run along with him for a few lamps, as children always do, and he says something to them without stopping that makes them laugh and fall away, and an old man on a step raises a pipe to him, and he touches his cap with the pole hand and walks on, and the street he leaves behind him is a different street, an evening street, roofed with dark and walled with little fires. Gas light is a warm light, warmer than the light we keep now. It does not banish the night, it only makes small golden rooms inside it, a room around each lamp and walking down such a street is walking through lit rooms with dark and quiet halls between them, and every step of it is calming to something very old in us, the creature that wants to see the fire from the cold field and to know that it can come in.

Halfway down the street the fog thickens for a moment, a slow soft wave of it rolling up from the river end, and the furthest lamps dim and swim, and the world draws in until it is only this stretch of pavement, this railing beaded with damp, this lamp ahead. Sounds change inside fog. They come rounder, nearer, gentler, as if the whole city had been wrapped in wool, and out of that softness you hear the two-note call of a boy, somewhere bidding some one good night, and the answering note, and a hand-cart's wheel, with its small squeak going away down a side turning, squeak and fade, squeak and fade, until it is gone.

The fog smells of coal and river water and cold iron, the smell every Londoner of this age knows the way you know the smell of your own pillow, and though the histories will tell you truly that the fogs of this city could be fierce and choking in the black heart of winter. Tonight is not that. Tonight the fog is only the city's breath on a cold evening, drifting, thinning already, and through a gap in it, the first star shows for a moment over the chimney pots. One small silver point above ten thousand smoking chimneys, and is covered again, in, softly, like a lamp shaded by a considerate hand. And here, at last, between a lamp and a lamp, is your own door.

Number seventeen. The brass number is the same brass number, sitting a little crooked, as it has sat for years, and the knocker below it, and the fan light above, glowing faint from the hall lamp within, and the front step scrubbed pale and white-edged this morning, as it is scrubbed every morning, whitened at its rim with hearthstone, because in this city, in this age, the state of a front step is a quiet public letter about the state of the house behind it, and this step says, in its pale scrubbed plainness, all is well here, All is looked after.

All is as it should be. Stand on it a moment. Feel for the key in your pocket. The long, cool iron of it. Worn smooth. Behind you the street breathes. A lamp purrs. The fog drifts thin across the light. Somewhere below stairs, a pan lid rings like a small bell. And the cold is just beginning to find your collar, which is the exact right moment. The moment the whole evening has been walking toward, to put the key in the lock, and turn it, and go in, the door opens into warmth. It meets you at the threshold like a hand on your shoulder, the gathered warmth of the whole waking house, and with it, the house's own smell, which is lamp oil and coal smoke, and furniture polish, and old paper, and the ghost of every fire, and every dinner the house has known, folded together into something that is not any of those things anymore, but simply home. This home. Nobody else's. And under it. Tonight, riding out from the kitchen stairs at the back, the plain golden smell of supper. Chops, you would say, and potatoes, and something of onions in gravy, and bread lately cut. The hall is narrow and warm and dim, lit by a single small oil lamp on the bracket by the stairs, turned low, its flame a steady bud of gold behind the glass.

The hull stand holds its umbrellas and its coats and its one crooked hat that nobody wears and nobody moves, and the barometer on the wall points, as it has pointed all week, at change, which is the barometer's way of saying that it, too, makes no promises about tomorrow and sees no reason to worry tonight. Hang your coat on its hook, the hook that is yours by long usage, and your hat above it. The day is truly over now. Whatever the world wanted of you, it has had, and the door is shut on all of it, and from this side of the door, the city outside becomes what it will remain for the rest of our night together, a low-kind murmur beyond the walls, the purring of a vast, contented animal, on whose warm back this little house is riding slowly toward morning.

Go down the hall, past the closed parlour door with its line of fire-light underneath, to the top of the kitchen stairs, where the smell of supper rises to meet you properly, and the light comes up warm from below, and the sounds of the kitchen come up with it, fire settling in the range, the lid of a saucepan chattering softly, a spoon set down on the table, and go down, step by step, into the warmest room of the house. The kitchen is below the street, in the basement, as London kitchens are, and it is the engine room and the hearth-heart of the whole house, and at this hour of the evening it is at its best.

The range takes up most of one wall, the great black iron range, black-leaded till it shines like a beetle's back, its fire glowing red gold behind the bars, its ovens ticking with heat, its trivets and its hobs bearing their saucepans the way a strong horse bears its harness, easily, out of long habit. The light in the room comes half from the fire and half from the oil lamp in the middle of the big scrubbed table, and the two lights together lay a deep amber over everything, the dresser with its ranked plates standing on edge, blue and white, catching the lamp in a row of small curved gleams, the copper pans on their hooks going up the wall in order of size, like a family arranged for a photograph, the black kettle sitting back on the hob with its lid tilted, thinking its own slow steam-thoughts. The roller towel on the back of the scullery door, the sanded floor, the cat. The cat must be mentioned. The cat is on the rag rug in front of the range, arranged in that shape cats take on winter evenings. A perfect tucked circle with the tail laid over the nose, and it opens one eye to establish that you are who you always are, and closes it again, and goes back to the great work of its life, which is exactly the work you and I are moving toward tonight, and at which it is a master, and we are only students, warmth, and the fires small sounds, and no plans at all.

Supper on an ordinary Tuesday, in a small London house, is a plain meal, and all the better for being plain. There is no dining room ceremony tonight, no covers, no courses. The kitchen table has been scrubbed so many thousands of times that its deal boards have gone pale as bone and soft-edged as driftwood, and at its end nearest the fire. The places are laid on a clean cloth, and the food comes the shortest possible distance, from the range to the table, hot as the fire that cooked it. Chops from the gridiron, with their edges just caught brown, and a dish of potatoes boiled floury and turned in butter, and onions stewed soft and sweet in gravy, and bread on its board with the knife beside it, and a jar of pickled red cabbage, sharp and vinegar bright, because no supper table of this age is complete without its pickle. And tea, of course. Tea strong and brown in the fat family teapot under its knitted cozy. Tea with everything. Tea being to this city what wine is to Paris.

Only more so. And more often. Eat slowly, because there is no reason on earth to eat fast. The chop is good, and the potatoes have taken the butter the way dry ground takes rain. And the gravy wants bread after it, and the tea is hot and sweet and comes round again without being asked for. The fire mutters in the range at your back and fills the whole side of you with warmth. The lamp stands in the middle of the table, with its flame trimmed neat, and around its light the talk goes its quiet evening round, and it is all small talk, in the best and oldest sense of small. How the day went, and it went well enough, what the fishmonger said about Friday, whether the fog will thicken tonight and the general settled opinion that it will not, that it is only a river mist and will be gone by ten, whether the geraniums in the window boxes should come in now or can stand another week, news of the street, which is the true newspaper of any life. The Mekin's eldest boy, gone to be apprenticed across the river, and his mother proud and red-eyed at the gate. The new people at number nine who keep a bird that sings half the day. The lamplighter's cold getting better. Nobody at this table is trying to be interesting. That is the deep comfort of family talk at the end of a working day, that it has given up performance entirely, that it is only the sound of people who belong to each other going gently over the small map of their shared world before they folded up for the night.

And when the plates are wiped and the last of the gravy is gone after the last of the bread, there is rice pudding because it is Tuesday, and rice pudding is what Tuesday means in this house, as it does in a hundred thousand houses tonight. It has been sitting in the slow oven all afternoon, growing a freckled brown skin over its sweet creamy middle, and it comes to the table in its round white dish, and there is a spoonful of jam for the middle of each helping, sinking in its own crimson slow motion, and it tastes of milk and nutmeg and warmth, and of every Tuesday there has ever been.

Outside, above your heads, beyond the area railings, the street has gone quiet, and the lamps burn on in the thinning mist, and boots pass along the pavement, at the level of the kitchen window now and then, unhurried boots, some neighbor going home late to a supper of his own, and the sound of them fades down the street, and is gone, and inside, the kettle is moved forward on the hob to be ready for the washing up, and begins, in its own time, its low singing. Let the washing up happen around you like weather, the good domestic weather of a kitchen at night, the scullery tap running, the dishes going down into the hot soda water, china knocking softly against China under the suds, the steady wiping and stacking, plate after plate returning to its place on the dresser. Each one turned edge on and slotted home into its groove, the cutlery rattling dry in the basket. The big pots scoured with sand and rinsed and set mouth down on the board. The table wiped in long strokes. Crumbs gathered into a palm, the cloth shaken at the area door into the dark, one snap of white in the lamplight, and the door shut again on the cold.

These are the closing rituals, the same every night, in every house on the street, in every street in the city, a million small tides of order coming in one after another, all over London, at this same hour, and there is nothing in any of them to think about, which is their gift, hands that have done a thing ten thousand times, do it by themselves, and set the mind free to be quiet, and a kitchen being set to rites at nine in the evening by lamplight, is one of the most peaceful sights this world has ever offered anyone, and it has offered it every single night for centuries, free to whoever was there.

The range is banked for the night. The fire raked low and pressed down under a shovel full of small coal and slack, where it will sleep red at its heart until morning, the way a dog sleeps with one ear up, and the damper is set just so, the same two inches it is set every night. The cat is lifted from the rug, boneless and un-protesting, and put out into the scullery where its box is, and looks deeply misused for the length of one yawn, and is asleep before the door is shut. The lamp is lifted from the table, and the kitchen goes to shadow and firelight behind you as you climb the stairs, and the warm breathing dark of it will hold there all night, ticking gently as the iron cools, one ember shifting now and then in the grate, with a small soft sound, like a word spoken in another room. And now the parlour, and the best two hours of the day, the hours that ask nothing whatever of anyone.

The parlour fire has been going since tea time, and the room is deep in its warmth, and the gas is lit. One bracket by the chimney-breast turned to a soft purr, and the lamp on the round table by the window besides. So the room is all amber and shadow, a small warm harbour of light, with the curtains drawn against the night, drawn right across, heavy plush curtains the colour of old wine, shutting the room in the way a lid shuts a workbox. It is a crowded little room, as parlours of this age are, and every crowded inch of it is somebody's meaning. The mantle shelf with its fringed velvet border and its china dogs, one at each end, who have faced each other across the clock for thirty years and have never yet exchanged a word. The clock itself under its glass dome, a wedding present, ticking its unhurried parlor tick, slower, you would swear, than clocks tick anywhere else. The the framed photographs on the wall, the stiff wedding groups, and the young man in uniform, and the seaside charabanc party, all those held breaths of past summers, growing gently browner year by year. The fern in its brass pot, the work basket by the fireside chair, spilling its worsted, the books in the little case, the Sunday books and the story papers, and the one novel everybody in the house has read three times.

The fire itself in its black grate, with its fender of brass and its set of fire irons that are used, and its second set that are only polished, and on the rug before it, warmth, pure settled warmth, the warmth a room only gets when the same fire has burned in it every winter night for a generation. Take the chair on the fire's right hand, the one who springs know you, and let the cushion take the last of the day out of your back. Your slippers are warming inside the fender, where somebody put them without a word, and that small fact is the whole kindness of family life in one image.

And you may sit here now for as long as you like, because nothing else is going to happen tonight, and everything that remains is small and warm and slow. The evening in the parlour is made of small occupations, and each one is a kind of rest wearing the clothes of a task. On the other side of the fire, the mending basket is open, and a needle is going in and out of a sock heel, stretched over a wooden mushroom, in and out, in and out, with the the firelight sliding up the needle at every stitch, and the wool drawing through with its tiny whisper, and there is no sound in the world more peaceful than mending being done by someone who has done it all her life and could do it in the dark.

The sock turns slowly on the mushroom. The ball of wool gives out its thread an inch at a time from the basket, and now and then rolls half a turn against the wicker and settles At the round table the day's newspaper is open to the lamp light, and being read at last properly in the leisurely back-to-front way an evening paper deserves, the shipping arrivals, the price of coals, a concert notice, a letter from a gentleman deploring the state of the pavements in high indignation and beautiful sentences, and the reader's pipe smoke climbs past the lampshade in a long, lazy blue rope that leans when the fire draws and straightens when it rests, and the smell of the tobacco joins the smell of the coals and the lamp oil and makes the third strand of the braid that is the smell of every parlour in this city tonight. If you listen past the fire, the house itself is talking quietly, the way old houses do at night. A stair creaks, all by itself, the same stair that always creaks, easing its old joints as the evening cools. The gas-bracket purrs its small green-gold purr, so steady that it has long ago become a kind of silence. The clock under its dome ticks, and once in a while gathers itself with a soft whir and strikes—nine slow strokes now, each one round as a fruit, and lets the last of them hang in the air and fade all the way to nothing before the tick resumes, and nobody in the room looks up. Because nine o'clock is not an instruction, it is only the house murmuring the hour in its sleep.

Beyond the curtains the street sends in its last few sounds, spaced further and further apart, the way waves spaced themselves out as the tide goes down, a pair of footsteps, and a gate, and a door, each fainter than the one before. A cab somewhere two streets away, the horses trot muffled by the mist, swelling gently, sinking again, gone, a church clock far off answering ours with its own nine, a beat behind all evening and untroubled about it, and further off still another, fainter, like an echo of an echo, all the clocks of London saying the same thing to one another across the rooftops, all night, softly, and no two of them quite together, and none of them ever minding.

There is cocoa at half-past nine, because there is always cocoa at half-past nine, made over the parlour fire itself, with the little brass kettle that lives on the trivet, the milk stirred in the blue jug, the sweet steam of it filling the fire's half of the room, and it is drunk slowly, cupped in both hands, down to the sugary silt at the bottom of the cup, while the fire is let to burn low and is not made up again, because the evening has turned that corner now, past mending, past the newspaper, into the last loose ten minutes when nobody does anything at all, when the needle is stuck through the sock and left, and the paper is folded and dropped by the chair, and everyone simply looks into the fire, which is the oldest television there is, and the only one that has ever sent the watcher gently to sleep, and the coals shift and flare in little soft collapses, building and unbuilding their glowing cities, and the shadows of the China dogs stand long and mild up the chimney-breast, and the clock ticks, and the gas purrs, and the cocoa cools in the cups, and the day, the whole enormous day, with its city and its millions and its ten thousand streets, has narrowed at last to one small room, one dying fire, and the sound of your own slow breathing. Somewhere in that last firelit hour, the photograph album comes down from its shelf, as it does perhaps one evening in twenty, for no reason anyone could name, and it is a heavy thing, bound in pebbled leather with a brass clasp, and it opens across two laps at once, tilted toward the lamp.

The pages are thick as biscuit, with their oval and arched windows cut to hold each likeness, and the faces look out of them in that grave, patient, slightly startled way that belongs to photographs of this age, when a likeness took long seconds of held stillness, and cost real money, and happened perhaps four times in a life. Here is a wedding pair, the young man seated because the photographer said so, one hand splayed on his knee, the bride standing with her hand upon his shoulder, both of them solemn as church wardens and both of them, if you look slowly, holding down a smile at the corners because it was a good day, a famous day, and the stiffness was only for the camera and everybody knew it.

Here is a baby who is now a grown man across the river, propped in a wash of white lace on a chair you would recognise, for it is the very chair you are sitting in. Here is a charabanc party at the seaside, twelve souls and a driver, the ladies' hats tied down with veils against the sea-wind, the gentlemen holding their own hats on their knees, everyone squinting joyfully into a sun that set forty years ago, and behind them a long pale beach with bathing machines, standing in the shallows like patient horses, and if you put your ear very close to that photograph, you might almost catch the gulls.

The pages turn slowly, each with its small creak of the binding, and the names are said quietly as the faces pass, and some of the names are said with a smile, and some are said more softly, with the particular gentleness a family keeps for those who have gone on ahead, and there is no grief in it tonight. Only the long mild candlelit affection of people looking at their own, and then the clasp is shut, and the album goes back to its shelf, and every face in it goes back to sleep between the biscuit pages, safe, remembered, requiring nothing, and the fire has burned a shade lower in the time it took, and the room is a shade warmer for it.

And through the party wall, if the room falls quiet a moment, the neighbours reach you faintly, as they do every evening. And this too is part of the piece of a terrace, this living shoulder to shoulder with other lives you never see and always hear. From number fifteen, through the chimney-breast, the light quick notes of that piano again, the same eight bars, and then, at long last, the ninth bar. And a tenth, the whole phrase carried through to its end for the first time all week, and then silence, the deep satisfied silence of a child, sent to bed on a victory.

From number nineteen, on the other side, nothing but the occasional deep settling sounds of a house of old people, a raked fire, a shifted chair, a clock even slower than yours, and once, faintly, a laugh, a single old contented laugh at something read aloud, and then the murmur of the reading going on. Above and below, and on both sides, all along the street, the terrace is packed with evenings like your own, each one sealed in its own lamplight behind its own drawn curtains, and the walls between them are just thin enough to let the warmth of the others through, and just thick enough to keep every evening its own. And a terrace at night is exactly that—a long row of small warm worlds, touching without intruding, like coals lying together in one great, night, each burning privately, all warming one another. Then the evening closes, in the order it always closes. The fire guard is set before the great, the humble iron guard that has stood its night watch over every fire this room has ever had. The gas is turned down and down and out, with that little sighing pop that gas makes when it goes, and the room The room jumps once with shadow and settles into pure firelight, red and low.

The lamp is carried to the hall, and the parlour door is shut on its warmth, and the good dark room is left to tick and glow and cool behind its door all night, keeping its own company, as it likes to do. And now the house is being locked for the night. And let us go slowly here, because this is the true liturgy of the hour. The same in this house as in the castle, seven hundred years before it. The same tonight, as it will be in your own home later, when you rise from wherever you are lying, or perhaps you have done it already, and the doing of it is why you are lying down so easily now.

The front door first, the bolt at the top shot home with a firm old click, and the chain slipped into its groove, and the key turned in the mortise and left standing in the lock, the way it is always left. The back door off the scullery, bolted top and bottom, and the cold air of the yard, tasted for one moment through the crack, coal and fog and washing line, before it is shut out. The window catches, tried with a knuckle, parlour, kitchen, each one already fastened, each one tried anyway, because trying them is not about the windows, it is about the being sure, and the being sure is the whole point, the being sure is what the body will sleep on. And the small ceremony ends, as it always ends, at the foot of the stairs, with one look back down the dark hall, at the thin red line of fire-light under the parlour door, all quiet, all fast, all well, and the house shut round its people, like a hand round something warm. Now up the stairs, by candle. The lamp stays below, turned out, and the last flight of the day is climbed inside a small moving tent of candlelight, your shadow swinging slow and huge on the stair wall beside you, changing size at every step, the banister cool and smooth as a spoon under your hand, and each stair announcing you in its own voice, the deep one, the two silent ones, the creaker, which you step over from habit even though there is no one left asleep to wake, and up onto the landing, where the house's night settles round you completely.

It is colder up here, away from the fires, the clean cold of bedrooms in a coal-fire age, and the candle shows you the landing's familiar dark furniture, the linen press with its deep-held breath of lavender and clean cotton, the engraving of a ship in a storm that has hung becalmed on this wall for thirty years, the doors of the other rooms, each one shut on its own darkness and its own sleeper, and under the furthest door, no light, only the slow even quiet of someone already gone ahead of you into sleep, showing you the way.

And so to your own room, and the door closes behind you with its soft particular click, the last door of the day. And here at the end of all the streets and stairs and hours, the room is plain and cold and entirely kind, an iron bedstead with brass knobs that catch the candle in four small golden points, a washstand with its jug and basin, the water in the jug stone cold now, and to be braved quickly in the morning, not tonight. A chest of drawers with a runner of white crochet, and on it a hairbrush and a shell from a seaside summer, and a small looking-glass that has the candle in it now, doubling its little light.

A strip of carpet on the boards, placed exactly where bare feet will need it. A text in a wooden frame over the bed, faded to gentleness. The curtains not yet drawn. the window a tall pane of deep blue night, with one misted lamp burning in the bottom corner of it, down the street, and above the black wave of the rooftops opposite, where the fog has thinned and torn, two stars, three, coming and going, as the last of the river mist breathes across them. Stand at the window one minute more, in the cold, in your candle's small warmth, and Look out at the sleeping city, because this is the site the whole evening has been carrying you toward, and it is worth the minute.

From here, one story up, London at night is mostly roofs, and roofs are the city's second landscape, the one only bedrooms and cats and pigeons ever really know. Slate upon slate they go, street behind street, wet dark and faintly shining, where the lamps touch them from below, pitching and falling like a sea that froze mid-swell, and out of that sea rise the chimney-stacks in their thousands, each with its little family of pots, tall ones and squat ones, crowned and plain, and from every second pot a slow feather of smoke stands up into the still night air, pale against the dark, leaning all one way together where some high air moves, like weed in a stream.

Half a million banked fires breathing out, half a million rooms below them, holding their warmth till morning. Between the roofs the streets show only as channels of soft light, a lamp here, a lamp there, a hazed golden scene running away toward the main road where a faint bloom in the sky over the housetops marks the shops and their late gas, and beyond that again, a way south, a broader, dimmer glow along the low sky, which is the river's mist with the whole city's light caught and diffused in it, hanging over the Thames like the shine over a bowl of embers.

And under the window, the street itself, empty now, lamplit from end to end, the pavement's silver grey with damp, the railings dark, every house opposite showing the same last pattern, dark windows above, one faint warm scene below where a hall lamp waits for a late comer or simply keeps its small faith till the master of the house winds the clock and puts it out. While you watch, one of the lit fanlights across the way goes dark. Then, after a while, another. The street is going out room by room, house by house, the way a bed of coals goes out, no hurry, no order, each fire keeping its own council about when. Somewhere behind you in the house, a wall ticks as it cools.

Somewhere out in the dark a cat crosses the street, low and certain, from one area railing to another, on business of its own, that it has no intention of explaining, and is gone down the steps of number twelve like a poured shadow. Listen. The city is still there, under everything. That great soft breathing roar has sunk now to the very floor of hearing, a sound like the sea heard from a mile inland, the sum of every wheel still turning, and every hoof still falling, and every engine still working through the night, somewhere in all those miles of streets, too far and too many to ever be still, and yet gathered by distance into one deep hum that does not disturb the night but underlies it, the way the drone underlies the tune.

Nearer, the sounds come single and spaced, each one wrapped in quiet, a late cab, streets away, the horse trotting long and loose, a tired trot going home to its stable, and its nose-bag, passing across your hearing, from left to right, behind the houses, and sinking away. The dull far bark of a dog answered once by a further dog, and then thought better of by both. A railway engine away north, shunting, a chain of soft iron collisions rolling down its train, like a sigh running down a spine. Then the long release of steam, miles off, gentle as breath. And then the near sound, the best sound, the measured tread of the constable on his nightbeat coming up the pavement opposite, slow boot after slow boot, unhurried as the lamp lighter, trying a shop door handle at the corner with a rattle you can barely here, pausing under the lamp, moving on, his tread fading up the street, with the calm of a man whose whole duty tonight is to walk slowly around the sleeping houses and find everything exactly as it should be.

And everything is as it should be. His footsteps are the sound of that sentence, said over and over, all night, street by street, fainter and fainter, all's well, all's well. The church clocks and ten o'clock across the roofs while you stand there, the near one first, ten deliberate bronze strokes with all the time in the world between them, and then the others, taking it up across the distance, near and far, high and low, overlapping, agreeing in everything but the moment, until the last far one has finished murmuring it to the last Far Street, and the air closes over the hour like water over a slow stone.

Ten o'clock, and the city has said it to itself a thousand times over, and under all those roofs, in all those rooms, the candles are going out by the hundred now, and the beds are creaking their one creek, and the blankets are being drawn up over a hundred thousand shoulders, and the whole vast brick and slate creature is lying down piece by by peace, as it has lain down every night for a thousand years, and will lie down again tomorrow, and none of it, not one street of it, not one soul of it, needs anything at all from you.

And before the curtains close, give one slow look to the houses across the way, because each dark front over there is a finished evening like your own. Behind that upper window with the white blind, someone has been asleep this half hour, and their fire is ash, and their boots stand by their bed pointing tidily at tomorrow. Behind the next, a candle still moves, small and slow, tipping the blind gold and letting it fade, gold and fade, someone winding a watch perhaps, or hearing a child's last question through a door, one of those small last offices of the day that cannot be hurried and never need to be.

At number twelve, the cat you watched has been let in after all, on the usual terms, neither side admitting anything. At number eight, the bird of the new people sleeps under a cloth, dropped over its cage, a small draped dome in a dark parlour, holding half a day's singing for the morning. And down at the corner house, where the old sea captain lodges, the light burns latest of all, as it always does, a steady lamp behind a red curtain, and no one on the street has ever learned whether he reads all night, or only cannot sleep far from a lit lamp after fifty years of watches at sea.

And no one has ever asked, because a street of this kind extends to every soul in it the one great courtesy of asking nothing, and the red window is simply part of the night now, like the lamps, like the mist, a fixed warm star at the end of the terrace, and the street would sleep less easily without it. So draw the curtains now, on the roofs and the lamps and the smoke, slowly, the rings sliding round the pole with their small run of clicks, and the room becomes all candlelight, close and simple, four walls and a bed. The water in the basin can wait for morning, all but a splash for face and hands, cold enough to make the towel feel like a kindness. The candle goes on the chair by the bed, where its light reaches everything it needs to reach, which is nothing. And the bed itself, when you turn it back, is a proper made bed of its age, sheet and sheet and blanket and blanket and counterpane, tucked and squared this morning and holding its shape all day like a maid thing. And the sheets when you get down into them are cold, linen cold, that clean startling cold that lasts half a minute and then begins, slowly, from every place your warmth touches, give way. And this half minute, this ancient nightly negotiation between a warm creature and a cold bed, is one of the oldest pleasures in the world, and no one has ever improved on it.

Pull the blankets high. Let their weight come down along you, the good heaviness of wool doing its one job. Feel the warmth start at your back and spread, inch by inch, into the cold country of the sheets, your own small climate forming around you under the covers, the way the fire's warmth formed the parlour, and the ranger's warmth formed the kitchen, the last and smallest and best of the evening's rooms of warmth, this one exactly the size of you. The candle has burned itself small while you settled, and the lamp is low downstairs in the hall too. Turn to its least bud of flame to keep its small faith till morning, and there is no need to tend either of them again tonight.

Let the lamp burn down there in its own time, as it always does, and lean over now, and blow the candle out. The dark comes in one soft beat, and then it is not quite dark after all. It never is. The curtains hold a faint edge of lamp glow from the street, just enough to grey the ceiling, and the little looking glass on the chest keeps one dim silver memory of it. And as your eyes settle, the room assembles itself around you in shades of almost black. The wardrobe, the door, the frame above the bed, all the patient furniture of the night, standing in its places, keeping still, keeping watch, asking nothing.

The pillow is cool under your cheek and smells faintly of laundry soap and lavender from the press, and the bedstead gives its one iron tick as it takes your warmth, and then the room is quiet, and the house is quiet, and the night can begin its long, slow work. Listen to the house going to sleep around you. It has its own order, its own liturgy, older than any of its people. The stairs ease themselves, one dry creek at a time, unlearning the day's footsteps. The parlour fire, shut behind its door below you, settles with a small final rustle, you feel more than hear, an ember slipping into the ash, as gently as a word left unsaid.

Water knocks once in a pipe somewhere in the wall, and thinks about it, and does not knock again. The clock under its glass dome ticks on in the dark parlour with nobody to hear it, and does not mind, clocks of that age being wound with a week of patience at a time. The linen press on the landing breathes its lavender into the cold. The cat in the scullery is a warm circle, inside a warm circle, dreaming of the rag rug it was removed from, bearing its exile with the fortitude of its kind. And below the cat, below the scullery flags, the foundations, London clay, forty feet of it, the oldest sleeper in the house, on which the whole street lies as steady as a fleet at anchor, in a sea that has not moved for a million years.

And now, while you lie warm in the middle of it, let the city keep you company a little longer because a great city at night is not an absence of life, but a different tempo of it. A baseline, and if you listen with half an ear, the way one listens on the edge of sleep, you can hear the night shift of London taking over the world from the day shift quietly out beyond the curtains, and every sound of it is a reason to stay exactly where you are. Down at the corner where the main road crosses, the coffee stall will be setting up about now, the little green wooden stall on its barrow wheels, with its two brass urns and its swinging lamp, and all through the small hours it will stand there in its own island of light and steam, serving thick mugs of coffee and slabs of bread and butter to the scattered brotherhood of the night, the cabmen with their horses blanketed and dozing between the shafts, the constable at the turn of his beat, the printer walking home with the morning's paper already inked on his hands, the drover in early off the road. And nobody at that stall will say much, because night people are quiet people, but the urns will breathe their steam under the lamp until the sky goes grey, a small warm heart beating at the corner of the dark, and you may think of it there, all night, whenever you like, and be glad of it without ever leaving your bed.

Away south, on the river, the tide is turning about now, and the Thames begins its slow midnight business of carrying things quietly past the sleeping city. A string of barges goes down on the ebb, with one riding light burning, the water black and folded and shining like coal, and the barge man leans on his sweep and says nothing for an hour at a time, and under the bridges the current talks to the stone piers in its low riverish voice, the same few syllables over and over that it has been saying since before there was a city here at all, and along both shores the moored lighters lift and touch and lift and touch, with the smallest wooden knock, hundreds of them. All night, the river's own slow tick, and in the pool below the bridges the tall ships stand asleep at their buoys, with their yards crossed against the mist, come in from every ocean of the world, with tea and timber and wool and grain, and a ship's bell, struck somewhere out on the water, sends its two soft notes across the roofs of the riverside parishes, and a watchman aboard answers it with nothing at all, because all is well there too.

And north of you, and east, in the great goods yards, the railways are doing their gentlest work, the night work, the long trains coming in and being taken apart and made again, wagon by wagon, with those soft rolling chains of buffered sound you heard before, and the mail is going out of London in every direction at once, the sorters swaying in their lit carriages through the dark counties, and somewhere a signalman in his warm box above the silent lines pulls his levers and sets his lamps and puts his kettle back on the stove, one small lit window hanging in the black miles, and all of it, every wheel and lamp and letter of it, is being done so that the morning will arrive in order, and none of it requires you, and all of it is being seen to, and you may lay the whole city down now the way you would lay down a book at the end of a chapter, knowing the story keeps on by itself.

Here at home the night has its small events, and they are all benign. Toward one o'clock a handsome comes right down your own street, the hoofbeats swelling until the lamp light slides across your ceiling between the curtains, two bright bars travelling slowly from one wall to the other and folding away into the corner, and the cab stops a few doors up, and there is the small clatter of the doors, and a voice saying good night and meaning it, and a latchkey, and a front door closing on the last person to come home tonight, and then the cab going away lighter than it came, and the street settling back into its lamplit stillness like water after a leaf has touched it.

Toward two, a wind you cannot feel moves somewhere high up, and the chimney breathes one long low note across its pots, a sound like someone blowing gently over the mouth of a bottle, once and not again. And somewhere in the smallest hour a market cart passes at the top of the street, one of the hundreds already moving in from the country lanes, through the sleeping suburbs, piled with cabbages and celery and chrysanthemums, the horse walking in its sleep, the carta dozing upright, with the rains looped on his wrist, bound for the great markets that wake at four, so that even now, in the very trough and middle of the night, tomorrow's breakfast is already travelling toward the city, and the first fires of the bakehouses are already being raked into life somewhere below the pavements, and the smell of tomorrow's bread is already beginning, faint and few, and secret, in the streets where nobody is awake to notice.

The night is not an emptiness at all. It is a workshop of quiet preparations, all of them tending toward morning, all of them in hands that know their work, none of them yours. And lying here, half in the night and half out of it, you find the day itself coming back to you, not as thought exactly, more as pictures floating up the way they do on the very edge of sleep, and there is no harm in letting them come, because this day asked so little and gave so much, and it began, as all its days begin, with the street waking under your window before you were awake yourself. It began with the milk, before it was properly night, while the lamp still burned pale in a grey half-dawn, and the mist lay in the areas like water. The milk cart came up the street, with its two great brass-bound churns, and the pony knew every stopping place better than the milkman did, halting at each gate on its own judgment, and the milkman went from door to door with his long-handled measures, the gill and the half-pint and the pint, dipping and pouring into the jugs left out on the area sills, and the sound of it came into your half-sleep as it comes every morning, the ring of the measure against the churn, the pony's single hoof-stamp, the light rattle of the cart moving on, a sound so woven into the mornings of this street that nobody properly hears it any more. They only know, somewhere under waking, that the day has been set going, and that the first of its small deliveries has been made, and they turn over once more into the warm. Then the doorsteps. By full light the street was down on its knees, house after house, the maids and the mothers out with their pails and their kneeling mats and their blocks of hearthstone, scrubbing the steps and whitening the edges, working backward from the door in slow wet arcs, and calling to each other sideways along the terrace, without ever pausing the brush. And the smell of wet stone and yellow soap went up the street with the smoke of the newly lit ranges, and by eight every step in the terrace stood pale and clean as a new loaf, drying whiter as the morning aired. Forty small proud proofs laid end to end, that the street was awake, and the street was respectable, and the street went on. And the postman came twice before noon, in his smart red-piped coat, rat-tat at one door in ten, and the muffin man came through late in the morning, with his tray on his head, and his bell and his call, and the coal-cart came to number eleven, and the The coalmen in their leather-backed caps ran their sacks down through the pavement plate with that long rushing roar of coal into the cellar.

One sack, two, three—each roar ending in a slap of the empty sack folded onto the pile. And the housewife counted the sacks from her window, as housewives have counted them since coal first came to London. And the great city drew its breakfast smoke up into the morning sky, from a hundred thousand kitchen fires, and all of it happened without you, and all of it will happen again tomorrow without you. And the knowing of that, here in the warm dark, is like a hand smoothing the blankets.

And the day went its way as such days go. The streets filled and hummed, and did their business. The omnibuses swayed along the main roads shoulder to shoulder like patient cattle. The clerks' pens scratched in a thousand offices. The barrows cried their oranges and their watercress. The school bell rang the children in, and the school bell rang them out again. Milk pudding and copy books in between, and the afternoon light came slanting down the the long streets the colour of weak tea, and the shops lit their gas one by one as the early dusk came up. And then the whole tide turned, as you saw it turn, and carried everyone home, yourself among them, past the chestnut brazier, into the evening we have already spent together, so that the day closes now like a ring closing, morning to night, milk cart to mail train, door step to door step, and every hour of it accounted for, and every hour of it ordinary, and every hour of it now safely over.

And if you let the pictures drift a little further, past this one day, the street will show you its whole year, turning slow as a wheel in the dark behind your eyes. This same street in deep winter, under snow, the whole terrace gone white-roofed and hushed, The lamps burning in little golden caves of falling flakes, the milk carts' wheels silent, and only the ponies' bells to be heard, the boys' snowballs thumping soft against the lamp columns, the kitchen fires burning higher, and the smell of every dinner richer in the cold, and the front steps scrubbed even so, snow or no snow, because some faiths do not take holidays.

In the street in spring, the window boxes suddenly loud with new geraniums and musk, the housewives airing bedding out of every upper window so the terrace flies white flags the whole length of itself, the crossing-sweeper leaning on his broom in actual sunshine, the muffin man given way to the watercress girl, fresh creases, fine creases, and the evenings drawing out so far that the lamp lighter comes almost at bedtime and children are still playing hopscotch on the warm pavements when the lamps wake.

And the street on a summer Sunday evening, every door open for the air, families on their steps in their shirt sleeves and their Sunday quiet, a concertina three houses down playing something slow, the smell of minuet from the window boxes, and dust and warm brick, the sky above the chimney-pots keeping its light till ten, and the whole terrace sitting out together in the long dusk, like one family on one long doorstep, saying very little, watching the swifts. And then autumn again. This autumn. Tonight. The mist and the chestnuts and the early lamps. And the wheel comes round to where you lie. And it will keep turning.

and spring and summer and autumn, over this street and over your own, with the same gentle disregard for hurry, world without end, and you may ride it down now, turn by turn, breath by breath, into the dark. Think again of the day you have walked through, not to hold it, only to let it pass by once more on its way into the dark, the way you would watch a boat go down the river, the chestnut brazier at the corner, and its warmth on your face. Think again of the lamp lighter, going from iron column to iron column, with his little flame on the end of his pole, and the string of lit lamps lengthening behind him down the misty street, the scrubbed white edge of the doorstep in the dusk, the key turning, and warmth of the hall meeting you like a hand. The kitchen's amber light, the ranked blue plates, the kettle's tilted lid, the cat in its circle on the rug, the rice pudding with its freckled skin, and the spoonful of jam going down crimson into the white, the needle in the firelight, in and out, in and out, the nine slow strokes of the parlor clock, all the clocks of London answering each other across the roofs. The bolt shot home, the chain in its groove, the thin red line of firelight under the parlour door, the candle's tent of light climbing the stairs with you, the cold sheets warming.

Every one of those moments is folded now into the same drawer as all the ordinary evenings that ever were, and the drawer slides shut without a sound, and it does not lock, and You may open it again any night you please, and nothing in it will ever be any further away than this. And the people of this evening are all asleep now. The lamplighter is asleep, his pole standing in the corner by his door, his round finished, every lamp of it burning faithfully out there in the mist without him.

The draper is asleep above his dark shop, and the bolts of wool sleep on their shelves in rows. The grocer's boy is asleep, and the constable's tread is three streets off and turning away, and the coffee-stall man leans on his barrow in his island of lamplight and steam, and lets his eyes rest without quite closing them, which is his way. The barge-man swings at anchor now below the bridges, his lantern out. The dary women of the castle, seven hundred years before this night, are asleep in the same deep way, and the porter by his brazier, and every sleeper of every century, lies down at last in the same one darkness, which has never been anything to fear, being only the world, with its lamp turned low so that its people can rest.

The whole long street of time sleeps door by door, and you are in your own door of it, warm, and the step is scrubbed, and the fire is banked, and all's well. Now let the body finish what the evening began. You have been lying still a long while, and the bed has finished warming, and the weight of the blankets has settled into that perfect settled heaviness that no longer feels like weight at all, only like being held, and there is nothing left of the day anywhere in you except a warmth in the muscles that is already turning into sleep.

Let it turn. at your feet, which have carried you the whole length of the evening, along the main road and down the quiet streets, and over the doorstep, and down the kitchen stairs and up the bedroom ones, and which have nothing more to do now until morning. Let them be heavy. Let them be as heavy as they want to be, two warm stones at the foot of the warm bed, done, and entirely Let the heaviness come up past your ankles into the long muscles of your legs. Slowly, the way the warmth came up the cold sheets, inch by inch, no hurry, each inch letting go of a little more of the standing and the walking and the climbing.

Until your legs lie along the bed like the street lies along the sleeping earth, perfectly still, perfectly carried, needing to hold up nothing, not even themselves. Let your hands go next. They have done their small faithful work today. Keys and cups and coins and banisters, the newspapers pages, the candle, the cold splash of water, and now they are empty. And an empty hand on a warm blanket is one of the most finished things in the world. Let the fingers curl the way they curl by themselves when nobody is asking anything of them. Let the arms grow heavy from the shoulder down, heavy and slow and warm, and let your shoulders themselves come down at last, all the way down, giving up the small held inch they have carried since morning, without telling you, and as they sink, feel how the bed takes everything, how it has been taking everything all along, how there is not one ounce of you that needs your attention to go on being held. The bed holds you, the house holds the bed, the street holds the house, and the sleeping city holds the street, and the deep clay holds the city, and holding, all the way down, is the only thing happening anywhere tonight.

Let your back soften into the mattress, bone by bone, the long ladder of your spine unclimbing itself, rung by rung, from the neck downward, each rung sinking a little, as the one above it lets go, and let the breath in your chest find the pace it finds when nobody is watching it, the slow tide pace, in without effort, out without end, the pace of the river under the bridges, the same few syllables over and over, and let your jaw unclench, and hang soft, and your tongue lie loose behind your teeth, and the small muscles around your eyes, which have been focusing all day, on faces and pages and lamps and steps, let them go completely, so that your closed eyes rest in the dark, the way the street rests under the mist, nothing to look at, nothing coming, only the soft grey ceiling of the night, and lamp glow at the curtain's edge, which will keep its small faith out there until the dawn puts it out. The near church clock sends one stroke out across the roofs, a single soft bronze note, and the far clocks answer it, one, and one, and one, across the miles, fainter, and fainter, until somewhere at the edge of hearing the last of them says it to the fields, and the sound goes out like a ring widening on still water and does not come back.

One o'clock and the whole city under its blanket of smoke and mist is one warm sleeping creature now, half a million banked fires breathing slow and red under its roofs, the coffee stalls steaming at its corner, the constables' boots saying all's well to the empty pavements at the far end of his round, the barges touching and lifting on the black water, the market carts coming in through the lanes with their sleeping carters, the bread beginning underground, everything held, everything seen to, everything moving gently toward a morning that will arrive without your help and can be trusted to wait for you on the far side of a long, deep, dreamless dark.

There is nothing more to do to-night. There was never very much to do to-night, and now there is nothing at all. The day is folded, the door is bolted, the fire is banked and the guard is up, and the key stands patient in its lock, and the lamp outside burns steady in the mist, and the great city hums its lowest, kindest note to every sleeper in every street of it, to the the lamp-lighter, and the draper and the grocer's boy, to the carter and the signalman and the barge-man, to the cat in the scullery and the pigeons under the eaves, and to you, warm in the middle of it all, heavy in the middle of it all, safe in the middle of it all, drifting now, further with every breath, down past the last of the evening, down past the last of the lamplight. Down where the clay sleeps and the river murmurs and the clocks agree at last. All's well, all's well, all is very well. Rest now. The room is warm, the night is long, and you have nowhere to be. Sleep well. Good night.