The expert we in America call the elevator-boy
stepped from the car, took three paces forward, faced to attention and
saluted. This elevator boy could not have been less than sixty years of
age; a great white beard streamed towards his belt. I saw that the lift
had been longer on its voyage than I had suspected.
Later in our upward progress a natural event would have been an
establishment of social relations. Two enemies imprisoned together
during the still hours of a balloon journey would, I believe, suffer a
mental amalgamation. The overhang of a common fate, a great principal
fact, can make an equality and a truce between any pair. Yet, when I
disembarked, a final survey of the grey beard made me recall that I had
failed even to ask the boy whether he had not taken probably three trips
on this lift.
My windows overlooked simply a great sea of night, in which were
swimming little gas fishes.
CHAPTER VII
I have of late been led to reflect wistfully that many of the
illustrators are very clever. In an impatience, which was donated by a
certain economy of apparel, I went to a window to look upon day-lit
London. There were the 'buses parading the streets with the miens of
elephants There were the police looking precisely as I had been informed
by the prints. There were the sandwich-men. There was almost everything.
But the artists had not told me the sound of London.
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