The Journal of a Disappointed Man

In Fleet Street, you exchange the Whitechapel sausage restaurants for Taverns with "snacks at the bar," and the chestnut roasters, with their buckets of red-hot coals, for Grub Street camp followers, selling L'Indépendance Belge or pamphlets entitled, Why We Went to War. In the Strand you may buy war maps, buttonhole flags, etc., etc. I bought a penny stud. One shop was turned into a shooting gallery at three shots a penny where the Inner Temple Barristers in between the case for the defence and the case for the prosecution could come and keep their eye in against the time the Germans come. Outside Charing Cross Station I saw a good-looking, well-dressed woman in mourning clothes, grinding a barrel organ.... Returned to the Library and read the Dublin Review (article on Samuel Butler), North American Review (one on Henry James) and dined at seven. After dinner, read: Evening Standard, Saturday Westminster, and the New Statesman. Smoked six cigarettes and went to bed. To-morrow Fifth Symphony of Beethoven. October 25. Too Late Yesterday's ramble has left me very sore in spirit. London was spread out before me, a vast campagne. But I felt too physically tired to explore. I could just amble along--a spectator merely--and automatically register impressions. Think of the misery of that! I want to see the Docks and Dockland, to enter East End public-houses and opium-dens, to speak to Chinamen and Lascars: I want a first-rate, first-hand knowledge of London, of London men, London women. I was tingling with anticipation yesterday and then I grew tired and fretful and morose, crawled back like a weevil into my nut. By 6.30 I was in a Library reading the Dublin Review!