London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

At the Cheshire Cheese, a year before the war, a young Fleet Streeter asked the question. He had heard some of us spinning yarns. But the name of Boulanger meant nothing to him....

Freshwater is an overgrown village which sprawls about the western end of the lovely Isle of Wight. The meanness of much of its masonry is compensated by its remarkably wholesom...

One broiling afternoon--it was in August, 1893--a Great Western train from London left me at a wee-bit station on the top of a Welsh mountain. The station was called "Penwylt."...

Too much is said about the evanescent nature of an actor's fame. Is it so evanescent? Or are we believing, according to habit, merely what we have been told? Burbage's fame has...

The man most talked of in '88-'90 was not Mr. Gladstone but Mr. Parnell. The Parnell Commission "had shaken the earth", as an Irish writer said in a moment of unusual restraint....

The enthusiasms and antagonisms set alight by Mr. Gladstone in his long career flame now, a generation after his death, quite as fiercely as they did before the Great War. Not t...

He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of his house, making difficult calculations and strange diagrams in a little book bound in green morocco. It would be five minutes...

A bright, warm, summer morning. I was working under pressure in my study in Cheyne Walk on an article which had to be finished that afternoon. Saturdays were my busiest days and...

Stanley was the most self-contained man imaginable, when he chose to be. And when he chose to be otherwise, his anger was terrific. He had a hard face and steely-cold grey eyes....

The wind was from the east, the Scotch "mist" from everywhere, but Professor Blackie had a sunny heart that made one forget the raw weather. I thought the sun was shining and th...

We were smoking churchwarden pipes and telling how Jock This and Sandy That had made their money. I hope the Free Kirk folk will not be scandalised by the revelation, especially...

You will look in vain now for the old brown-brick bungalow that stood, for the most part concealed by trees and shrubs, within the railings of the park-like enclosure halfway do...

I have never been so old as I was during my first three or four years in London. It is, or at any rate it used to be, a common delusion of youth that the mantle of years has des...

The slender, dapper figure halted; over the quizzical face a look of astonishment flashed; the flat-brimmed silk hat lifted perceptibly by the contortion of an eyebrow; and the...

After a winter in London I went to Paris for a part of the spring, stopping on the way a day in Rochester (I had the Dickens fever then), and another day in Canterbury for the C...

London was a more livable place in the late seventies than it is now, or so it seems to me, as it seems to many others who knew the town in that earlier time. There were not so...

I was fresh from New England, and had left Boston, my native city, seventeen days before, embarking at New York on the Anchor liner _Alsatia_ three days later; disembarking at T...