"A Tale of London" by Lord Dunsany

desiderate: to entertain or express a wish to have or attain. All definitions of this word that I can find say it is a verb (which the definition given is for the transitive verb form), yet in this story it is most definitely used as an adjective. We should assume it retains a comparable meaning such as 'desirable'.

The picture used is from Le Livre d'Or des Voyages, tome : Asie, par Louis Mainard, Paris : édité chez Argand, Baraduc & cie, Imprimerie Générale A. Lahure, sans date (circa 1890)

This book was published in 1916. We don't know what timeframe this particular story is set in, but I would hazard to guess it probably isn't meant to be too far distant in time from its writing.

To follow along: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/13821/13821-h/13821-h.htm#london

Well that's quite a dream-version of London, eh? *boggle* So, today's lesson, kids? Stay away from hasheesh!

Turns out the editing of my book is not great. There were two spots in this rather short story where the syntax was utterly nonsensical, as if entire lines of text were missing. In the end I fixed these problems in my recording using the online version linked to above. In every other respect expect those two spots the texts were identical, so I expect the online text is correct. No idea why my physical book missed so many times like that, I didn't have any troubles whatever with "The Book of Wonder", and it's literally the same book, they put both that and this book into the same volume. That does not bode well...

Also a couple of places that really could have used a comma or two to help parse the sentence into cogent clauses! Elementary school mistakes from a professional author and/or editor?! Tsk.