Bohemia In London Classic Reprint PDF Download

Excerpt from My Life: Sixty Years' Recollections of Bohemian London I began these reminiscences, written at the suggestion of my friend the editor of the Evening News, in the first hour of the year 1916. The front door was flung wide at five minutes to midnight on December 31, 1915, and as the last Of the twelve momentous Shocks of sound died away a dark man in the Shape Of a friendly policeman did me the kindly service of being the first to cross my threshold. And now that the New Year has come to us amid an almost oppressive stillness, with no gay clang of church bells, and only a far distant and apparently restrained welcome by the steam-whistles and the hooters of the great works where labour toils through the night, I sit down in my grandfather's big cane-seated arm-chair and peer into the dim and distant past. In the hour that my land is athrill and athrob with the alarums and excursions of the greatest war the world has ever known, my memory carries me back to the day just upon Sixty years since when all London was abroad far into the night celebrating the blessed peace that had come to us after the agonies of the Crimea. I gaze from my window into the blacked-out expanse of the park, and I see once again the skies of that memorable May night ablaze. From Hyde Park, from Victoria Park, from St. James's Park, and from Primrose Hill a thousand devices in golden flame have been hurled into the air. But no fireworks of joy flame in the night skies above me in the year that we have just entered upon. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.