Stray Studies from England and Italy

There are few stiller things than the stillness of a summer's noon such as this a summer's noon in a broken woodland with the deer asleep in the bracken and the twitter of birds silent in the coppice and hardly a leaf astir in the huge beeches that fling their cool shade over the grass. Afar off a gilded vane flares out above the grey Jacobean gables of Knoll the chime of a village clock falls faintly on the ear but there is no voice or footfall of living thing to break the silence as I turn over leaf after leaf of the little book I have brought with me from the bustle of town to this still retreat a book that is the record of a broken life of a life broken off as he who lived it says of another with a ragged edge. It is a book that carries one far from the woodland stillness around into the din and turmoil of cities and men into the misery and degradation of the East end that London without London as some one called it the other day. Few regions are more unknown than the Tower Hamlets. Not even Mrs. Riddell has ventured as yet to cross the border which parts the City from their weltering mass of busy life their million of hard workers packed together in endless rows of monotonous streets broken only by shipyard or factory or huge breweries streets that stretch away eastward from Aldgate to the Essex marshes.