It is the pavement on
which the legend of London's disgrace is written in bold characters of
defiance. Men from distant lands, having made the pilgrimage to our
Mecca, the queen, by right of magnitude at least, of the world's cities,
stare aghast upon the legend, almost as Belshazzar stared upon the
writing on the wall. Colonists seeking for the first time the comfortable
embrace of that mother country which has been the fable of their
childhood and the dream of their laborious years of maturity, gaze with
withering hearts at this cancer in her bosom. Pure women turn their eyes
from it. Children seek it that they may learn in one sharp moment the
knowledge of good and evil. The music of the feet on that pavement has
called women to despair and men to destruction; has sung in the ears of
innocence till they grew deaf to virtue, and murmured round the heart of
love till it became the heart of lust. And that pavement is the
camping-ground of the army of the bats. On wet nights they flit drearily
through the rain. In winter they glide like shadows among the revealing
snows. But in the time of flowers and of soft airs, when the moon at the
full swims calmly above the towers of Westminster, and the Thames rests
rocked in a silver dream among the ebony wharves and barges, the
flight of the bats is gay and their number is legion.
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