...
"This," it came to me, "is England. That is what I wanted to give in my
book. This!"
We started in the late afternoon. We throbbed out of our yard above
Hammersmith Bridge, fussed about for a moment, and headed down stream.
We came at an easy rush down Craven Reach, past Fulham and Hurlingham,
past the long stretches of muddy meadow And muddy suburb to Battersea
and Chelsea, round the cape of tidy frontage that is Grosvenor Road and
under Vauxhall Bridge, and Westminster opened before us. We cleared
a string of coal barges and there on the left in the October sunshine
stood the Parliament houses, and the flag was flying and Parliament was
sitting.
I saw it at the time unseeingly; afterwards it came into my mind as the
centre of the whole broad panoramic effect of that afternoon. The stiff
square lace of Victorian Gothic with its Dutch clock of a tower came
upon me suddenly and stared and whirled past in a slow half pirouette
and became still, I know, behind me as if watching me recede. "Aren't
you going to respect me, then?" it seemed to say.
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