midnight of the
23rd April
and what shapes a great city hid I now first know . * * * * * I left no quarter unremembered , taking a train , no longer of four , but of eight , vehicles , drawn by an electric motor which I re-charged every morning , mostly from the turbine station in St. Pancras , once from a steam-station with very small engine and dynamo , found in the Palace Theatre , which gave little trouble , and once from a similar little station in a Strand hotel . With these I visited West Ham and Kew , Finchley and Clapham , Dalston and Marylebone ; I exhausted London ; I deposited piles in the Guildhall , in Holloway Gaol , in the new pillared Justice-hall of Newgate , in the Tower , in the Parliament-house , in St. Giles ' Workhouse , in the Crypt and under the organ of St. Paul 's , in the South Kensington Museum , in the Royal Agricultural Society , in Whiteley 's place , in the Trinity House , in Liverpool Street , in the Office of Works , in the secret recesses of the British Museum ; in a hundred inflammable warehouses , in five hundred shops , in a thousand private dwellings . And I timed them all for ignition at midnight of the 23rd April . By five in the afternoon of the 22nd , when I left my train in Maida Vale , and drove alone to the solitary house on high ground near Hampstead Heath which I had chosen , the work was well finished . * * * * * The great morning dawned , and I was early a-stir : for I had much to do that day . I intended to make for the sea-shore the next morning , and had therefore to choose a good petrol motor , store it , and have it in a place of safety ; I had also to drag another vehicle after me , stored with trunks of time-fuses , books , clothes , and other little things .