466 ANGEL PAVEMENT

animals and bright birds. If you are a Stoke Newington
ratepayer, you have only to turn a corner or two to catch
the soft shining glances of deer, to meditate upon the
spectacle of birds so fantastically fashioned and coloured
that it is impossible to believe that both they and North
London are equally real, that one or the other is not a
crazy dream. You stand there, a litter of peanut-shells
and paper bags all round you, with a Stoke Newington
dinner inside you struggling with your digestive juices,
and you suddenly hear a scream from the jungle and a
green and scarlet wing from the Orinoco is flashed at
you.

There are links, however, between these two worlds.
One of them was standing beside Mr. Smeeth, and wore
a short grey beard and a dusty bowler. "Yus," he re-
marked, looking at the gorgeous birds, then at Mr.
Srneeth, then at the birds again, and doing it master-
fully, as if to keep both the birds and Mr. Smeeth there,
"yus, I been where them things comes from. Common
as sparrers there, yer might say. Bigger than these, too-
yus, and brighter colours on 'em. Yus, I been where
them birds comes from."

"Is that so?'* said Mr. Smeeth. "And when was this?
Not lately, I'll bet,"

4'And you'd win, mister. Forty years ago, that was, in
good old Queen Victoria's time. Ah, yer little devils!''
he cried, addressing the birds now. "What d'yer think
o' that, eh? Forty years ago. I left the sea thirty-five
years ago, mister, but I'd stopped going to them places
five years before I left the sea for good an' all. Yus, the
last five years I was on the North Atlantic run, and you
don't see any o' them little dazzlers up there—fog and
icebergs is what you see up there, mister. But I've seen