Waking up six hours later, Drake looked out upon a brown curtain of London fog.

The lamps were lit at the crossings in Trafalgar Square--half-a-mile distant they seemed, opaque haloes about a pin's point of flame, and people passing in the light of them loomed and vanished like the figures of a galanty-show.

From beneath rose the bustle of the streets, perceptible only to Drake, upon the fourth floor, as a subterranean rumble.

'London,' he said to himself, 'I live here,' and laughed unappalled.

Listening to the clamour, he remembered a map, seen somewhere in a railway guide, a map of England with the foreign cables, tiny spider-threads spun to the four quarters and thickening to a solid column at Falmouth and Cromer, the world's arteries, he liked to think, converging to its heart.
The notion of messages flashing hourly along these wires brought to mind the existence of the _Meteor_.