_
ENDEAVOUR
_By_
J*HN G*LSW*RTHY
The dawn of Christmas Day found London laid out in a shroud of snow.
Like a body wasted by diseases that had triumphed over it at last,
London lay stark and still now, beneath a sky that was as the closed
leaden shell of a coffin. It was what is called an old-fashioned
Christmas.
Nothing seemed to be moving except the Thames, whose embanked waters
flowed on sullenly in their eternal act of escape to the sea. All
along the wan stretch of Cheyne Walk the thin trees stood exanimate,
with not a breath of wind to stir the snow that pied their
soot-blackened branches. Here and there on the muffled ground lay a
sparrow that had been frozen in the night, its little claws sticking
up heavenward. But here and there also those tinier adventurers of the
London air, smuts, floated vaguely and came to rest on the snow--signs
that in the seeming death of civilisation some housemaids at least
survived, and some fires had been lit.
One of these fires, crackling in the grate of one of those
dining-rooms which look fondly out on the river and tolerantly across
to Battersea, was being watched by the critical eye of an aged
canary. The cage in which this bird sat was hung in the middle of
the bow-window.
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