Being strollers in the streets, we delight in this extempore illumination. It is our object to see and observe; and Messrs. Moses and Son convert night into day for our especial accommodation. A whole legion of lesser planets bask in the region of this great sun. Crowds of subordinate advertising monsters have been attracted to this part of the street, and move about in various shapes, to the right and to the left, walking, rolling on wheels, and riding on horseback.

Behold, rolling down from Oxford Street, three immense wooden pyramids—their outsides are painted all over with hieroglyphics and with monumental letters in the English language. These pyramids display faithful portraits of Isis and Osiris, of cats, storks, and of the apis; and amidst these old-curiosity-shop gods, any Englishman may read an inscription, printed in letters not much longer than a yard, from which it appears that there is now on view a panorama of Egypt—one more beautiful, interesting, and instructive than was ever exhibited in London. For this panorama—we are still following the inscription—shows the flux and reflux of the Nile, with its hippopotamuses and crocodiles, and a section of the Red Sea, as mentioned in Holy Writ, and part of the last overland mail, and also the railway from Cairo to Alexandria, exactly as laid out in Mr. Stephenson’s head. And all this for only one shilling! with a full, lucid, and interesting lecture into the bargain.

The pyramids advance within three yards from where we stand, and, for a short time, they take their ease in the very midst of all the lights, courting attention. But the policeman on duty respects not the monuments of the Pharaohs; he moves his hand, and the drivers of the pyramids, though hidden in their colossal structures, see and understand the sign: they move on.

“We are being invaded by the East!” says Dr. Keif. “They are going to give a panoramic explanation of the Oriental question. If I were Lord Palmerston, I’d put a stop to that sort of thing. It’s a high crime and misdemeanour against diplomacy. Pray call for the police!”

But Dr. Keif is wrong again. On the back of the mosque there is an advertisement, which is as much a stranger to the Oriental question as the German diplomates are. That advertisement tells us, that Dr. Doem is proprietor of a most marvellous Arabian medicine, warranted to cure the bite of mad dogs and venomous reptiles generally; even so, that a person so bitten, if he but takes Dr. Doem’s medicine, shall feel no more inconvenience than he would feel from a very savage leader in the Morning Herald. The mosque, the blue crescent, the gaudy colours, and the juvenile Arab from the banks of the Thames, have merely been got up to attract attention. There need be no very intimate connexion between the things puffed and the street symbolics which puff them. Heterogeneous ideas are as much an aid to puffing as homogeneous ideas. If ever you should happen to go to Grand Cairo, rely on it, every cupola of a mosque, peeping out from palm-groves and aloe-hedges, will remind you of Dr. Doem and his Arabian medicine, as advertised in Holborn in Europe. Allah is great, and the cunning of English speculators is as deep as the sea where it is deepest.

Hark! a peal of trumpets! Another advertising machine rushes out of the gloom of Museum Street. In this instance the Orient is not put in requisition. The turn-out is thoroughly English.

In no other town would such tricks be necessary conditions of existence; but here, where everything is grand and bulky—in this town of miraculous extent, where generations live and die in the East-end without ever having beheld the wonders of the West-end—among this population, which is reckoned by millions instead of by hundreds of thousands—here, where all press and rush on to make money or to spend it—here, where every one must distinguish himself in some way or other, or be lost and perish in the crowd—where every hour has its novelty—here, in London, even the most solid undertakings must assume the crying colour of charlatanism.

The Panorama of the Nile, the Overland Route, the Colosseum, Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition of Wax-works, and other sights, are indeed wonder-works of human industry, skill, and invention; and, in every respect, are they superior to the usual productions of the same kind. But, for all that, they must send their advertising vans into the streets; necessity compels them to strike the gong and blow the trumpet; choice there is none. They must either advertise or perish.

The same may be said of great institutions of a different kind; of fire and life insurance companies; of railways and steamers; and of theatres—from Punch’s theatre in the Strand, upwards, to the Royal Italian Opera, which ransacks Europe for musical celebrities, and which, nevertheless, must condescend to magnify its own glory on gigantic many-coloured posters, though it has managed, up to the present day, to do without the vans, trumpets, and sham Nubians.

It is either advertising or being ruined. We have said it before. Many of our readers will think this a bold and unwarranted assertion. It is neither the one nor the other; for it is founded on the experience of many men of business. Of many examples we quote but one.

Mr. Bennett’s business is as prosperous as ever. Of course, his watches were quite as good during the period he did not advertise; but the public was about to forget him. Advertising is an indispensable item in the expenditure of a London trader.

A boy on our right puts printed papers into our hands. On the left, the same process is attempted by an elderly man of respectable appearance, who jerks his arm with what he believes to be a graceful indifference, while everybody else would mistake that same jerk for a convulsive gesture of despondency. Just before us we have a man with a pole and board, recommending some choice blacking, and on the opposite pavement there is a Hindoo dressed in white flannel, with a turban on his head, and with all the sorrow of a ruined nation in his handsome brown face and chiselled features. At his side is a little girl dressed in filthy rags. The Hindoo has a bundle of printed papers in his hand, Sabbatarian, temperance, and other tracts—inestimable treasures—which he offers to the public at the very low price of one penny each. That poor fellow got those tracts from some sacred society as a consideration for allowing them to convert him to Christianity. But his sad face is a sorry recommendation of the treasures of comfort he proposes to dispose of. Better for him to stand in primitive nudity among his native palm-forests, adoring the miracles of nature in the Sun, and in Brahma, than to shiver here on the cold, wet pavement, cursing the torments of want in the image of the sacred Saviour. On the banks of the Ganges that man prayed to God; here, among strangers, he learns to hate mankind. But then he was a pagan on the banks of the Ganges; on the banks of the Thames he has the name of a Christian. Whether or no the Christian is really more religious than the Pagan was, is a question which seems to give little trouble to the pious missionaries. The Bible Society has done its duty.

A MAN may be familiar with London streets, he may for years have gone his weary way amidst these endless rows of bare, narrow, irregular houses, which are black with fog and smoke, without ever suspecting that gardens sparkling in idyllic beauty are hidden behind those masses of sooty masonry.

This is one of the chief distinctions between London and Paris and other continental capitals. Paris has much outside glitter, much startling show. Its Boulevards, its Place de la Concorde, Place Vendôme, Rue de la Paix, Rue Rivoli, and sundry others of its streets and public places are unrivalled; London cannot vie with them in architectural prodigies. But the brilliant points of Paris, of which Frenchmen are in the habit of boasting, attract our attention only to divert it from the narrow crooked lanes, and the filth of the other parts of their town. Paris sports a clean shirt-front merely to hide the uncleanliness of its general nature. The French are adepts in the art of draping. The English, on the contrary, know nothing whatever of that noble art. The cut of their clothes is inelegant, but the cloth is the best of its kind; their dwelling-houses have the appearance of old chimneys, but the inside is replete with comfort and unpretending wealth; their language is rough, and without melody; but it is energetic, flexible, and expressive. Their metropolis, too, conceals its real beauties. It requires some investigation, some instinct and discernment to discover and enjoy them.

Travellers proceeding from London to Dover pass through a series of monstrous tunnels, which have been bored through those mountains of chalk, the bulwarks of the British islands. As they emerge from the darkness of the last tunnel, they feel happy and grateful for the fresh sea-breeze which plays around and the vast, boundless view which opens before them. In a like manner, do we breathe more freely as we emerge from the last of these narrow, and by no means sweetly-smelling lanes.

A broad square, filled with trees, flowers, and garden-ground, opens before us. This is one of the many “squares” of which you, O my beloved countrymen, entertain such crude and indistinct notions!

Let us return to Lincoln’s Inn Fields.

We stand on classic soil. Three sides of this large square are surrounded with buildings, whose open doors shew at once that they are not mere ordinary dwelling-houses. One of them attracts our special attention; it is so black and its columns are so many and so high. It is the Royal College of Surgeons, where the medical students pass their examination in surgery. This house, too, shelters the famous Anatomical Museum which John Hunter bequeathed to the College of Surgeons. All the other buildings are owned by the guild of the lawyers. In the heart of the city, the houses, from the cellars to the garrets, are let out as offices and store-rooms. The houses in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, too, are devoted to the special accommodation of lawyers. A walk up and down, and a look at the door-posts, which are black with the names of advocates, suffice to convince us of the lamentable condition of English law.

We have said that this is classic soil. Sir Thomas More, Shaftesbury the statesman, and Lord Mansfield, studied in the precincts of Lincoln’s Inn; and Oliver Cromwell passed two years of his eventful life in the same locality. The square has its sad reminiscences too. In the centre of the gardens, where flowers blow and birds sing, there stood at one time a scaffold; and on that scaffold died one of the noblest patriots of England, Lord Russell, an ancestor of Finality John, and son to William, Earl of Bedford.

They accused him of having conspired against the king’s life, and sent him to the Tower. Witnesses were bribed to appear against him; they were men of proverbial villany. Among them was Lord Howard, of whom the king himself had said he would not hang the worst cur in his kennel on the evidence of that man. But that man’s evidence sufficed to bring the best man in all England to the block. It is the old story—a tail-wagging cur is more considered at court than a thinking man. Lord Russell’s head fell in the centre of this very square. Vainly did his wife implore the king’s mercy. Lord Russell’s head fell in the immediate vicinity of his estates; and the Londoners of those days saw him pass through Holborn on his way to the scaffold. Many wept—many abused him; others jeered at him. The people of that time had even less respect for its heroes and martyrs than the present generation. In our days, even the vilest of the vile are awed into silence when the princes of this earth deliver their political adversaries to the hangman’s rope or the “mercy” of a platoon of rifles.

But even in these our own days there is a party in England, there are Englishmen, citizens, writers, and members of Parliament, and most of them truly honourable men, who, while they declare that the British Whigs of those times were patriots and martyrs, do not hesitate rashly to condemn the “rebellious” Parliaments and political parties of the continent. No Englishman, not the most conservative, would dare to deny to Lord Russell one single ray of that glorious crown of martyrdom which the English people and its historians have placed upon his bleeding head.

If, therefore, in the next years, France should happen again to attain those giddy heights of freedom, which she gained three times already, and which three times have vanished beneath her feet, then let not France, as she is wont to do, wax proud in the scanty shade of her newly planted trees of liberty, and let her not look down contemptuously on the cold, thickblooded, clumsy tree of liberty in England. At the end of the century the two nations may compare their charters; it will then be seen which of them has really and truly had the greatest gains. The blood of France has manured the mental soil of all the world; England should be the last to forget what her liberty has gained by the ideal conquests of France. France, on the other hand, might make the most useful study in considering the consistent carrying out of great political maxims on the British soil.

IF you leave King William-street just at the foot of London-bridge and turn to the right, you will find your way into a set of narrow and steep streets, few only of which admit of carriage and horse traffic. The lower stories of the houses are let out as offices, and the upper as warehouse floors; the pavement is narrow and the road as bad as broken stones and long neglect can make it; dirty boys in sailors’ jackets play at leap-frog over the street posts; legions of wheel-barrows encumber the broader parts of these thoroughfares; packing-cases stand at the doors of houses, and cranes and levers peep out from the upper stories. Such are the streets which lead down to the banks of the Thames. It is altogether a dusty, filthy, “uncannie” quarter. A few steps through a black, cornery, nondescript structure of sooty brick and mortar, covered all over with immense shipping advertisements in all colours, and we stand on the bank of the river. An entirely new scene is opened before our eyes.

But, whatever the Thames may lose in romance, it gains in the grandeur and importance of its appearance. Its breadth increases with every step. Navigable to the length of 180 English miles, with a tidal rise to the extent of seventy miles, the Thames takes the largest merchantmen to the immediate vicinity of London-bridge; and as the tide is going out it takes them back, without the help of oars, sails, or steam-tugs. Nature has made the Thames the grandest of all trading rivers; it gave it a larger share of the ocean tides than it ever bestowed on any other river in Europe.

At the Land’s End the tides from the Atlantic are divided into two distinct streams. One rushes up the Channel, and round the North Foreland into the mouth of the Thames; the other beats against the western coasts of England and Scotland, and, taking a southerly direction down the eastern coast, this tide too enters the basin of the Thames. Hence the tides in the Thames are formed of two different ocean-tides; they are equal by day and by night, and so powerful is the rush of the tide from the North Foreland to the metropolis, that it flows at the rate of five miles an hour.

But here is the boat smoking away right at our feet. There is a rush of persons from the shore, and a rush of persons to the shore. We pay two-pence, scramble down a variety of steps and stairs, and jump on board just as they are casting off. There is no whistling or ringing of a bell, no noise whatever. We are already steaming it up to the far west.

The bank on our left offers no interesting points on which the eye might dwell with pleasure. Manufactories, breweries and gas-works dispute every inch of ground with the ugliest store-houses imaginable. The sight strikes one as that of a large city in ruins. But on our right we see St. Paul’s rising from an ocean of roofs. The sun, still visible on the horizon, shines on the roof of the cathedral, and shows the gigantic cupola in the most charming light. St. Paul’s ought to be seen from the river by those who would fully understand its grandeur.

Seven enormous bridges have been built across the river at very short intervals, and unite the more animated parts of the Borough and Lambeth with London proper. Among these bridges is an iron suspension bridge with a bold double arch; another bridge is composed of iron and stone; and the rest are simply built of massive stones. It is true that only three of these seven bridges are freely open to the public, and that the four others exact a toll. But, for how many years past, have the Germans talked of a stone bridge across the Rhine at Cologne, and another stone bridge across the Danube at Vienna! And as yet neither Cologne nor Vienna have mustered the funds for such undertakings! And in London there are seven bridges within a river-length of a few miles. A little higher up, moreover, is Battersea-bridge, and lower down the river there is the Tunnel, and already have they commenced making a new bridge at Chelsea. The English have a right to pride themselves on the grandeur of the British spirit of enterprise. But the German who comes into this country and beholds its marvels, makes comparisons which sorely vex and trouble his spirit.

We pass the Temple, the Chinese Junk, Somerset-house, the new Houses of Parliament, and Westminster Abbey, but we cannot stop to describe them, for we purpose to reserve them for a special visit on another occasion. Besides our attention is engaged by the general aspect of the river and its banks. Darkness has set in. Steamers with red and green eyes of fire rush past us; little boats cross in all directions under the very bows of the steamers; fishing-boats with dark brown sails go with the tide in solemn silence; the lights on the bridges and in the streets are reflected in the water. This is the hour at which matter of fact London dons her poetical night-dress.

“The season is over! every body is gone out of town,” etc., write the correspondents of provincial and continental newspapers—“every body”—that is to say, every body with the exception of two millions of men, who make rather a considerable noise in the northern, southern, and eastern towns of London. But of course they are “nobodies”; they are merely merchants, tradesmen, manufacturers, clerks, agents, public functionaries, judges, physicians, barristers, teachers, journalists, publishers, printers, musicians, actors, clergymen, labourers, beggars, thieves, foreigners, and other members of the “vile rabble.” Every body else left the metropolis immediately after the Parliament was prorogued by the Queen, and the Royal Italian Opera was prorogued by Signora Grisi. The West-end is now a city of the dead. The deserted streets and the shuttered windows proclaim that all who are not exactly “nobodies,” are shooting in Scotland or gaping on the Rhine; that they suffer from the blues in Italy, or that the trout suffer from them in Sweden. But Vauxhall is still open, partly because the weather is so uncommonly mild for the season; partly because there are a good many foreigners in London; but chiefly because Vauxhall has come to be vulgar—and very vulgar too—a haunt of milliners and democrats, “by birth and education.”

Vauxhall was born in the Regency, in one of the wicked nights of dissolute Prince George. A wealthy speculator was its father; a prince was its godfather, and all the fashion and beauty of England stood round its cradle. In those days Vauxhall was very exclusive and expensive. At present, it is open to all ranks and classes, and half a guinea will frank a fourth-rate milliner and sweetheart through the whole evening.

A Londoner wants a great deal for his money, or he wants little—take it which way you please. The programme of Vauxhall is an immense carte for the eye and the ear: music, singing, horsemanship, illuminations, dancing, rope-dancing, acting, comic songs, hermits, gipsies, and fireworks, on the most “stunning” scale. It is easier to read the Kölner Zeitung than the play-bill of Vauxhall.

The entrance to Vauxhall is dismally dark and prison-like. Dr. Keif objects to the place.

“It’s a trap,” says he; “the real road to ruin! I am sure the Chevalier Bunsen and that fellow Buol-Schauenstein lie in ambush in some of those dark holes; they will pounce upon me, and seize me, and take me back to Germany, where they have no brown stout, and where I must needs get famous, or die with ennui. Lasciate ogni speranza, voi che entrate!”

Just at that moment a German refugee goes by. He bids us good evening, and is lost in the darkness.

“Ah!” says the Doctor, “that boy has been sentenced to be shot in the Grand Duchy of Baden. I believe they shot him in effigy. He’s an imp of fame, and if he dares go in why should’nt I dare it. Let us go in!”

The dismal aspect of the entrance is the result of artistic speculation; it is a piece of theatrical claptrap. For all of a sudden we emerge from the darkness of the passage into a dazzling sea of light, which almost blinds one. All the arbours, avenues, grottos and galleries of the gardens are covered with lamps; the trees are lighted to the very tops; each leaf has its coloured lady-bird of a gas-light. Where the deuce did those people ever get those lamps! And how did they ever get them lighted! It must be confessed that the manager has done his duty. If you can show him a single leaf without its lamp, he will surely jump into the Thames or hang himself on the branch which was thus shamefully neglected.

“This way, sir! Look down there where the Queen is burning in gas,” says an Englishman, with a cigar in his mouth, who has overheard the Doctor’s lament. And he added—“Light your weed at the flames of Victoria, and implore Her Gracious Majesty that she may be pleased to abolish the duty on tobacco.”

From that moment is Dr. Keif lost to the rest of our party. An Englishman, who, spurning all old-established customs and traditions, dares to address a stranger, and to address him too on a subject which has nothing whatever in common with the state of the weather—such an Englishman is a rara avis, and nothing could induce Dr. Keif to forego his acquaintance. Already has he engaged him in conversation, utterly oblivious of the friends who came with him, and of all the world besides. We must try to get on without the Doctor.

The gardens are crowded; dense masses are congregated around a sort of open temple, which at Vauxhall stands in lieu of a music-room. The first part of the performance is just over; and a lady, whose voice is rather the worse for wear, and who defies the cool of the evening with bare shoulders and arms, is in the act of being encored. She is delighted, and so are the audience. Many years ago this spot witnessed the performances of Grisi, Rubini, Lablache, and other first-class musical celebrities.

Following the rivulet, we reach the bank of a gas-lit pond, with a gigantic Neptune and eight white sea-horses. To the left of the god opens another gloomy avenue, which leads us straightway to Fate, to the hermit, and the temple of Pythia, who, in the guise of a gipsy, reclining on straw under a straw-roofed shed, with a stable lanthorn at her side, is in the habit of reading the most brilliant Future on the palm of your hand, for the ridiculously low price of sixpence only. This is specially English; no house without its fortifications—no open-air amusements without gipsies. The prophetess of Vauxhall is by no means a person of repulsive appearance. You admire in her a comely brown daughter of Israel, with black hair and dark eyes; it is very agreeable to listen to her expounding your fate. She is good-tempered and agreeable, and has a Californian prophecy for all comers. She predicts faithful wives, length of days, a grave in a free soil to every one, even to the German.

The dwelling of the sage hermit is much less primitive, nor are believers permitted to enter it. They must stand on the threshold, from whence they may admire a weird and awful scenery—mountains, precipices and valleys, and the genius loci, a large cat with fiery eyes, all charmingly worked in canvas and pasteboard, with a strict and satisfactory regard for the laws of perspective. The old man, with his beard so white and his staff so strong, comes up from the mysterious depth of a pasteboard ravine; he asks a few questions and disappears again, and in a few minutes the believer receives his or her Future, carefully copied out on cream-coloured paper, and in verses, too, with his or her name as an anagram. Of course these papers are all ready written and prepared by the dozen, and as one lady of our party had the name of Hedwig—by no means a common name in England—she had to wait a good long while before she was favoured with a sight of her fate. This, of course, strengthened her belief in the hermit and the fidelity of her husband.

Hark! a gun is fired in the shrubbery. The promenaders, who are familiar with the place, turn round, and all rush in one direction, sweeping us along with them. Before we can collect ourselves, we have been pushed forward to a panoramic stage, on which Nelson, in plaster, is in the act of expiring, while Wellington, in pasteboard, rides over the battle-field of Waterloo. These two figures are the worst of their kind; still the public cheer the two national heroes. No house without its fortifications—no open-air amusements without gipsies—and no play without the old Admiral and the old General.

Wellington has scarcely triumphed over Napoleon, and silenced the French batteries, when the cannonade recommences in the shrubbery: one—two guns! it is the signal for the arena. Unless you purchase a seat in the boxes or the galleries, you have no chance of seeing the exhibition in the circus, for the pit, which is gratis, is crowded to suffocation. Englishmen care more for live horses than they do for pasteboard chargers, fraught though they be with national reminiscences.

It is past midnight. The wind is cold, and fresh guests are crowding in to join the ball, which is kept up to the break of day. But we have not the least inclination to watch the ungraceful movements of English men who dance with English women, or of English women who dance with English men. We hail a cab and hasten home.

The cup, which “cheers but not inebriates,” loosens Dr. Keif’s tongue. “The tea is very refreshing, Madam,” is a remark which the Doctor makes twice every day, in fine and foul weather; and, in making this remark, he always holds out his empty cup that it may be filled again.

“But, most loyal Sir John,” continues the Doctor, refreshed by the tea, “it’s a mighty difficult task to get through an English evening’s pleasure in a single night. To think of all the things I have seen this evening, and for half-a-crown too. Why one-half of them would suffice to entertain the inhabitants of a German capital for a period of six calendar months.”

“That is what I always say,” interposed Bella, the daughter of the house, with a look of triumph, “London is the cheapest town in the whole world.”

“So it is,” says Dr. Keif, “awfully cheap. I had some cold beef at Vauxhall, some cheese, and a cruet of wine, and I paid only nine shillings—on my honor nothing but nine shillings. The bread was not included. The waiter gave me a piece after I had asked him long enough. But I had scarcely put it on my plate, and I was lost in its contemplation, when it was carried off by a sparrow. Now that will give you an idea how very large it must have been.”

“But what could induce you to drink wine or ask for bread at Vauxhall!” said Bella. “And where have you been all the evening? What did you do with your friend?”

“Indeed! What was his English prejudice?” asked Sir John with great disgust.

“It is not easy to answer that question. National prejudice is like a pig-tail—you can’t see it in front. Another cup of tea, if you please, it’s only my fourth. And it’s scandalous how they teach history in your schools. This new friend of mine is a well-bred man, but he had never heard of Blücher. We looked at the Duke of Wellington riding over the field of Waterloo; and I said: ‘Couldn’t you find a place for our Blücher?’ ‘Blutsher,’ said he, ‘who is Blutsher?’ He knew nothing whatever of Blücher and the Prussian army; and when I told him, that but for the Prussians Wellington would have been made minced-meat of at Waterloo, he actually laughed in my face. Now tell me, most respectable Sir John, how do they teach history in your schools? The French, I know, cook history, and make matters pleasant for ‘the young idea.’ ”

Sir John was silent. The article he had read in the Times had made him magnanimous; and our friend Keif remained uncontradicted.

“I told my companion,” continued the Doctor, after a pause, “that the dancing was a disgraceful exhibition; he said, so it was. He had seen the dancing abroad. If he had never been out of England, I am sure, he would have been delighted with the performance of his countrywomen; and, as most Englishmen do in such a case, he would have shrugged his shoulders and set me down as a fool for the unfavourable opinion I pronounced. But he had left part of his prejudice on the other side of the channel, and he himself pointed out to me how ridiculous those people looked, and how the couples clung to one another like woolsacks which cannot stand alone, and how they pushed one another, and marked the time by kicking one another’s toes.”

“But surely, Doctor,” said Bella, “neither you nor your new friend can deny that better dancing is going on in London than in any other town. This very season we had Taglioni, Rosati, and Feraris, all on the same stage!”

“The old argument,” said the Doctor. “Because you have got money, and because you can afford to pay for a good ballet, you pretend that the most graceful dancers are hatched in England. You subsidised the German armies against Napoleon; and now you believe that your red-coats alone vanquished the French. Port and sherry are your English wines; and because you succeed, at an enormous expense, to rear hothouse peaches, grapes, and apples, you will have it that England produces better fruit than any other country. But it’s all nonsense. It’s money and money, and again money; and with that money you buy up the world, and—— After all, old England for ever! Then another cup of tea for me?”

“Did you see that gas-lit rivulet at Vauxhall?” asked I, for I like to hear the Doctor find fault with England. He does it in such a good-natured, amiable manner, and with a spice of roguishness which is all the more interesting, since in Germany Dr. Keif is generally disliked for his Anglomania. “What,” asked I, “do you say to the romantic style of decoration which prevails in England?”

“Of course I saw that rivulet, and had a splendid adventure on its banks.”

Dr. Keif is literally overwhelmed with adventures. He cannot go to the next street without a remarkable incident of some sort or other.