Excerpt from On the Staircase N London the earliest evenings in autumn are romantic beyond any others. The big electric lamps begin to whiz and flutter before the afternoon is gone, and night is upon the city while the dusk is still making eyes strain to see what, a moment earlier, had been quite Visible. And while the marvel grows usual and unsurprising during the weeks that follow, it seems at its first coming almost as fresh, and even as welcome, as the spring. That, Of course, is to the young and self-conscious, who recognise change without misgiving. TO the middle-aged in spirit the early autumn is as much a cause for melancholy foreboding as any other time of progress. There are no Old people nowadays. There are the young, to whom everything is capable of pro viding matter of interest, and there are the middle-aged, whose spirits are dulled. This book is mostly about young people. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.