I shall never forget the day when, at the age of sixteen, I left home and found my way to the roar and rattle and din of London. I had never seen such crowds anywhere, jostling and pushing for every inch of pavement. And yet I remember standing that day in the heart of the world's metropolis, under the very shadow of St. Paul's, and shivering in the thick of the crowd at my own utter loneliness.Amid the hops and the clover and orchards of my Kentish home, one could often shout to his heart's content, and never a soul would hear him. Yet that was a delicious and tranquil loneliness that one loved and revelled in, but the loneliness of that awful surging crowd seemed an intolerable thing.
F W Boreham, ‘A Canary at the Pole’ Mountains in the Mist (London: Charles H Kelly, 1914), 221-222.
Image: F W Boreham—“I shall never forget the day when, at the age of sixteen..”
