Now, the sultry weather makes it absolutely necessary to leave bedroom windows wide open, so that he who is courting sleep has all the advantage of studying the dialogue of the slums.  These disturbances last till two in the morning in some otherwise quiet districts near the river.  When Battersea ’Arry has been “on the fly” in Chelsea, while Chelsea ’Arry has been pursuing pleasure in Battersea, the homeward-faring bands meet, about one in the morning, on the Embankment.  Then does Cheyne Walk hear the amoebean dialogues of strayed revellers, and knows not whether Battersea or Chelsea best deserves the pipe, the short black pipe, for which the rival swains compete in profanity and slang.  In music, too, does this modern Dionysiac procession rejoice, and Kensington echoes like Cithaeron when Pan was keeping his orgies there—­Pan and the Theban nymphs.  The music and the song of the London street roamer is excessively harsh, crabbed, and tuneless.  Almost as provoking it is, in a quiet way, when three or four quite harmless people meet under a bedroom window and converse in their usual tone of voice about their private affairs.

These little gatherings sometimes seem as if they would never break up, and though the persons in the piece mean no harm, they are nearly as noxious to sleep as the loud musical water-side rough or public-house loafer.  Dogs, too, like men, seem to feel it incumbent on them to howl more than usual in hot weather, and to bay the moon with particular earnestness in July.  No enemy of sleep is deadlier than a dear, good, affectionate dog, whose owners next door have accidentally shut him out.  The whole night long he bewails his loneliness, in accents charged with profound melancholy.  The author of the “Amusement Philosophique” would have us believe that animals can speak.  Nothing makes more for his opinion than the exquisite variety of lyrical howl in which a shut-out dog expresses every phrase of blighted affection, incommunicable longing, and supreme despair.  Somehow he never, literally never, wakens his owners.  He only keeps all the other people in a four-mile radius wide awake.  Yet how few have the energy and public spirit to get up and go for that dog with sticks, umbrellas, and pieces of road-metal!  The most enterprising do little more than shout at him out of the window, or take long futile shots at him with bits of coal from the fireplace.  When we have a Municipal Government of London, then, perhaps, measures will be taken with dogs, and justice will be meted out to the owners of fowls.  At present these fiends in human shape can keep their detestable pets, and defy the menaces, as they have rejected the prayers, of their neighbours.  The amount of profanity, insanity, ill-health, and general misery which one rooster can cause is far beyond calculation.