Limehouse Night

Manhattan's Bowery is a slum of light and sweetness compared to London's drab East End. Mist from the Thames and smoke, soot-laden, wrap the long Limehouse streets in a depressing pall of grey. Vice in the East End is as commonplace as elsewhere, though perhaps a bit more furtively unclean. Yet East End squalor has its attractions for aristocrats. Smart Londoners go there occasionally, as do Manhattanites to Harlem's "Black Belt." Blue-blooded Socialists like Lady Cynthia Mosely, daughter of the late Marquess Curzon of Kedleston, dabble there in soapbox oratory.* Thither, for an escape from decorum, went last week Edward of Wales.

At 18, His Royal Highness seemed a boy; at 25, a lad; today, at 32, he passes for a youth. When he strode into The Bricklayers' Arms, a harmless enough "pub," shivering worn-out bums of 30 felt return the lively spring of their dead youth.

"A glass of beer behind the bar (as he was too self-conscious to do in his Oxford days) he drew a foaming schooner. "Your health!" he tasted the foam, then left the glass up on the bar where eager hands seized, drained it. "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow!" roared the bums. Perhaps abashed, Edward drifted toward the door, passed through the crowd with several handshakes and a jest. Thend sought a moment's respite.

*She was dabbling last week in the by-electoral campaign to return her husband, Oswald Mosely, son of Sir Oswald Mosely, Fifth Baronet, to the Commons as a Laborite.