midday
At seven I was watching a cab packed with my personal luggage and the collection of unwieldy and incongruous packages that my shopping had drawn down on me . Two deviations after that wretched prismatic compass -- which I obtained in the end secondhand , _ faute de mieux _ , near Victoria , at one of those showy shops which look like jewellers ' and are really pawnbrokers ' -- nearly caused me to miss my train . But at 8.30 I had shaken off the dust of London from my feet , and at 10.30 I was , as I have announced , pacing the deck of a Flushing steamer , adrift on this fatuous holiday in the far Baltic . An air from the west , cooled by a midday thunderstorm , followed the steamer as she slid through the calm channels of the Thames estuary , passed the cordon of scintillating lightships that watch over the sea-roads to the imperial city like pickets round a sleeping army , and slipped out into the dark spaces of the North Sea . Stars were bright , summer scents from the Kent cliffs mingled coyly with vulgar steamer-smells ; the summer weather held immutably . Nature , for her part , seemed resolved to be no party to my penance , but to be imperturbably bent on shedding mild ridicule over my wrongs . An irresistible sense of peace and detachment , combined with that delicious physical awakening that pulses through the nerve-sick townsman when city airs and bald routine are left behind him , combined to provide me , however thankless a subject , with a solid background of resignation .