And this wind so possessed me, that I at once went out:  with the crow-bar from the car I broke the window of a near iron-monger’s in Parliament Street, got a spade, and went into Westminster Abbey.  I soon prised up a grave-slab of some famous man in the north transept, and commenced to shovel:  but, I do not know how, by the time I had digged a foot the whole impulse passed from me:  I left off the work, promising to resume it:  but nothing was ever done, for the next day I was at Woolwich, and busy enough about other matters.

* * * * *

During the next nine days I worked with a fever on me, and a map of London before me.

There were places in that city!—­secrets, vastnesses, horrors!  In the wine-vaults at London Docks was a vat which must certainly have contained between twenty and thirty thousand gallons:  and with dancing heart I laid a train there; the tobacco-warehouse must have covered eighty acres:  and there I laid a fuse.  In a house near Regent’s Park, standing in a garden, and shut from the street by a high wall, I saw a thing...! 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.

My first journey was to Woolwich, whence I took all that I might ever require in the way of mechanism; thence to the National Gallery, where I cut from their frames the ‘Vision of St. Helena,’ Murillo’s ’Boy Drinking,’ and ‘Christ at the Column’; and thence to the Embassy to bathe, anoint myself, and dress.