Page:Letters from England.djvu/42

 brown Indian, a one-eyed man wearing a cap, a stout Armenian Jew and two taciturn men with pipes; the one-eyed man declared with a fearful pessimism that “something is sometimes nothing,” while the Indian advocated the more cheerful view that “something is sometimes something,” which he repeated twenty times in very tumbledown English. Then there was an old fellow standing there who held a long cross and on it a banner with the inscription, “Thy Lord calleth thee”; he was saying something in a weak and husky voice, but nobody was listening to him. So I, a lost foreigner, came to a standstill and supplied him with an audience of one. Then I wanted to go my way, for it was already night; but I was stopped by a man in a nervous state, but I do not know what he said to me; I told him that I was a stranger, that London was a terrible affair, but that I was fond of the English; that I had already been about the world a little, but that few things pleased me so much as the orators in Hyde Park.