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Updated: May 19, 2025
And London in early spring; London with the smuts washed off by torrential showers and then flooded with glorious sunshine; London with the young leaves like a thin veil of green on the limes and elms, and the tassels hanging from the poplars, and the sycamores and horse chestnuts already casting grateful shade; London with the mowing machines whirling in the parks and the watering-carts swishing down the streets is a fairy city for a young girl with a large hotel to live in, a generous father, and a lover somewhere hidden in those mysterious miles of crowds and houses.
It is not properly the storm that travels, but the low pressure, the storm impulse, the meteorological magnet that makes the storm wherever its presence may be. The clouds are not watering-carts, that are driven all the way from Arizona or Colorado to Europe, but growths, developments that spring up as the Storm-deity moves his wand across the land.
Here everything was bright and new and English miles of wharfs crowded with shipping, broad streets, the cathedral spire en evidence, tall warehouses, and handsome Government buildings. Watering-carts replaced the bamboo buckets in the streets, and English iron and stone work the quaint lamps and antiquated masonry.
Everything revives him, charms him, the noise of the watering-carts, the awnings of the cafes, pulled down to the middle of the foot-paths. The approach of death gives him the feelings of a convalescent accessible to all the delicacy, the hidden poesy of an exquisite hour of summer in the midst of Parisian life of an exquisite hour his last, and which he will prolong till night.
In the New Zealand back blocks people used to weep like watering-carts over its tawdry pathos; and when that awful, awful child, whose business it was to die and who would not do his business, talked to his mother about his mamma, the handkerchiefs waved everywhere, and a chorus of sympathetic sniffings and throat clearings almost drowned the fustian rubbish of the dialogue.
The gardeners were busy with the flower beds around the fountain, and the freshly turned earth smelled sweet and spicy. A lawn mower, drawn by a fat white horse, clinked across the green sward, and watering-carts poured showers of spray over the asphalt drives.
At the end of the Dehesa de la Arganzuela, opposite a large, spacious lot surrounded by a fence made of flattened oil cans nailed to posts, the gang paused to inspect the place, whose wide area was taken up with watering-carts, mechanical sweepers, ditch pumps, heaps of brooms and other tools and appurtenances of municipal cleanliness.
At every step he smiles, wafts a patronizing little greeting with the ends of his fingers, or performs the great flourish of the hat of a moment ago. Everything charms him, fascinates him, from the rumbling of the watering-carts to the rattle of the blinds at the doors of cafés which overflow to the middle of the sidewalk.
Consequently, when the balance of comfort and convenience has to be struck, it is surprising how small an advantage a really better climate gives when you take away watering-carts and shady streets for hot weather, and sheltered railway-stations and hansom cabs for wet weather, and roads and servants and civility and general convenience everywhere.
The drinking-fountain, where West Street joins Broad Street, is the gift of James Coppard, who was mayor at the time of Queen Victoria's jubilee, and Coppard is painted upon municipal watering-carts and over shop windows, and upon the zinc blinds of solicitors' consulting-room windows.
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