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“And now, O Lord, permit me to relate to Thee an anecdote”: that was how a minister, labouring with a good story, introduced it into the midst of his extemporary prayer. I ask to be excused a better exordium, if better there be.

Heaven knows what reminded me of it, but a friend of mine had an interesting experience at Hyde Park Corner one day. He had been riding in the Row, and was returning leisurely to Whitehall and official cares somewhere about eleven in the forenoon. At the gates of entry and issue he was held up in common with the traffic of east and west, which at that hour was almost at the flood. Omnibuses throbbed and simmered, dray-horses chafed at their bits, motors and taxis all stood obedient, bicyclists clung to whatever stays they could come by: in the midst two staunch policemen stood with their arms at danger. All that mighty heart was lying still, and there was a lane of emptiness, as if for royalty, from Constitution Hill. Along that presently there paddled a wild duck and her chicks in single file, the mother leading; all necks on the stretch, all eyes wide, all beak a-twitter. Everybody was interested, but nobody laughed, so far as he could see. I would have given much to be there. We are a pretty degraded race, no doubt, yet we have instincts left us which, at our best, betray us for what we were intended to be. I myself, such as I am, once caused a motor to be stopped while a stoat and her family crossed the Blandford Road, and we have a tradition that my father once reined up a phaeton to allow a woolly bear to get safely over. I daresay he did: such things are inherited. I mention them in no spirit of boasting, but rather to show that Londoners, who seem to us here so machine-made, are of the same clay as the children of light.

You may see queer things in London still, though they are rarer than they used to be. Nature persists in spite of the electrification of most things. I saw a battle in the upper air between a crow and a heron one morning early, in Hyde Park. Heaven knows from what regions fair and far they were come—but there they were at it, hammer and tongs. I watched them for a quarter of an hour. The heron got home once, but not a true blow. It glanced off the skull, and the black shuddered and avoided. It was inconceivable how quick the blow was, a very lightning flash; yet the crow swerved in time, and swopped off sideways. The baffled heron turned heavily and gave no chase. More persistent, and with death in it, was a duel watched by a man I knew from a Foreign Office window, between a swan and a pelican. The broadsword there had no chance against the longer reach. The end must have been terrific, for the swan took his enemy by the neck and held his head under water until the battling of his huge wings ceased to churn it into foam, until the great creature itself became like a lump of white froth. Then, said my friend, the swan lifted his own wings until they met above his back, threw his head up and back to rest upon them, and oared away towards the bridge. I would have given a good deal to see that also, perhaps six hours a day at the Foreign Office. There’s no end to the tale of things you can see in London. Why, a lady in whom I have every reason to believe came in to lunch one day saying that she had just seen a hansom drive down Victoria Street with an eagle standing on the horse’s back, balancing himself on outspread wings. What was one to say, except wish that one had been as lucky?

Against that extreme example of the picturesque I could only advance that I had seen an elm-tree fall on a man in Gray’s Inn and kill him instantly. Or that, at the corner of Montague Place, I saw a runaway brewer’s dray barge into a four-wheeler. It missed the cab (on whose box the driver sat intact), but caught the horse full and knocked him and the shafts with him down some area steps across the pavement—where indeed he remained as in his stall until he could be built up from below. Extreme urgency had hurtled him down the steps, but no persuasion, fore or aft, would move him up again. So they built him up with trusses of straw. Nothing quite so good as that ever happened to me in a four-wheeler; but I haven’t done so badly either. I was driving once through Paris very early in the morning from the Gare de Lyon to Saint-Lazare. You are lucky to get a cab at all at such times, and I thought myself so to have a crazy old victoria and a horse tied together with string. We did not exactly go, but we got, into the rue Lafayette, where, without any warning, the victoria parted amidships. The driver on his box and two wheels went on with the horse; I and my companion fell forward into the road and the hood of the thing atop of us. I set up a yell, half-laughter, half-alarm, which caused our man to look round. When he saw what had happened he pulled up, and very carefully descended from his perch. Did he come to help us? Not so. He went directly and deliberately into a cabaret, without any notice taken of any kind, and we saw him put away a noggin, or whatever it is, of cognac. Then, with the same meditated method, he came to extricate his charges. They, however, had by that time extricated themselves, and considered themselves shut of him.

When a Frenchman begins to drive anything, horse or motor, he seems to become intoxicated with progress, and content just to drive, not to guide, and never, at any rate, to stop. I have been the victim also of that generous ardour. It was in Algiers, ages ago, but not such ages that there were not tramcars along the sea-front. A baker in his covered cart was taking us to see some sight or other; and along the sea-front held his course magnificently indifferent to everything but the speed and joy of it all—aided not a little thereto by the fine afternoon, the business of the road, and the café tables hemming it, dense with customers. For it was the hour of absinthe. The trams flashed past us, coming or going, but little cared he for that. His object was to pass them, and he did pass one or two. Presently, however, at a curve he flogged his horse to pass one, on the wrong side, and just as he drew level, behold, another bearing swiftly down upon us! I confess that I blenched—but he did not; rather held on his way, and not until the last tick of our last minute on earth did it strike him that he must do something. And what did he do? He gave a wild shout and turned his horse sharply to the left. On his left was the overflow of a café—tin tables, bentwood chairs, syphons, opal-brimmed glasses, citizens in straw hats, with straws to their mouths, with cigars or newspapers—as thick as a flock of sheep. Into the midst of this, as once Don Quixote hurled himself, we plunged, horse, cart and passengers. Tables flew right and left, citizens were upset, glasses shivered, waiters wrung their hands. You never saw such a sight. And what did we do? I and my companion sat where we were, laughing ourselves ill, fighting for breath. Our driver slowly dismounted and looked round. He disregarded entirely the havoc he had made, and thought only of his honour. The driver of the tram was waiting for him. They met, and each lifted a bunched hand, in which all the finger-tips met and formed a little cage, to within an inch of the other’s nose. Then began des injures, which could only have ended in one of two ways. The arrival of the gendarmes decided in which of the two it was to end.