Chandos
A Novel (Classic Reprint)

Excerpt from Chandos: A Novel

It was the sultry close of a midsummer night in the heart of London.

In all the narrow streets about Westminster there were the roar of traffic and the glare of midnight; the throngs were jostling each other, the unscreened gas-jets of the itinerant stalls were flaring yellow in the stillness of the air, the screaming of ballad-singers pierced shrilly above the incessant noise of wheels, the shouting of costermongers, butchers, oyster-vendors, and fried-fish-sellers added its uproar of the pandemonium, and the steam and stench of hot drinks and of rotting vegetables was blent with the heaviness of smoke borne down by the tempestuous oppression of the night. Above, the sky was dark; but across the darkness now and them a falling star shot swiftly down the clouds - in fleeting memento and reminder of all the glorious world of forest and of lake, of rushing river and of deep fem-glade, of leafy shelter lying cool in mountain-shadows, and of sea-waves breaking upon wet brown rocks, which were forgotten here, in the stress of trade, in the strife of crowds, in the cramped toil of poverty, and in the wealth of mingled nations.

Few in town that night looked up at the shooting star as it flashed its fiery passage above the dull, leaden, noxious, gas-lit streets; none, indeed, except perhaps here and there a young dreamer, with threadbare coat and mad but sweet ambitions for all that was impossible - or some woman, young, haggard, painted, half drunk, whose aching eyes were caught by it, and whose sodden memory went wearily back to a long-buried childhood, when the stars were out over the moorland of a cottage home, and her childish wonder had watched them rise over the black edge of ricks through the little lozenge of the lattice, and sleep had come to her under their light, happily, innocently, haunted by no terrors, to the clear music of a mother's spinning-song.

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