Page:Our Girls.pdf/75

 Wordsworth's eye one early morning a century ago the "very houses seemed asleep, And all that mighty heart was lying still." The mighty heart is going with a bounding throb now, and I am by no means sure that the night-long activities of these red years of war do not make a yet more moving picture. Millions of women must be asleep in London by this time, but hundreds of thousands are at work—down there to the south-east, over the burrowings of the Borough, and through the interminable ways of the New and Old Kent Roads to Greenwich and Plumstead and Erith; round to the south-west over Lambeth and Wandsworth to Richmond and Farnham; up to the north-west over the scrambling reaches of Willesden to Amersham, and over the heights of Hampstead and Highgate to the towns and villages along the Great North road, where a blazing Zeppelin fell the other day, and De Quincey's stagecoach awakened the midnight echoes of 1815 with the triumphant bugle-blasts that