Strange ways.--"The bears that went over to Charlestown."--The delights of a runaway without its dangers.--Flower show at the Crystal Palace.--Whit-Monday at Hampton Court.--A queen baby.--"But the carpets?"--Poor Nell Gwynne.--Vandyck faces.--Royal beds.--Lunch at the King's Arms.--O Music, how many murders have been committed in thy name!--Queen Victoria's home at Windsor.--A new "house that Jack built."--The Round Tower.--Stoke Pogis.--Frogmore.--The Knights of the Garter.--The queen's gallery.--The queen's plate.--The royal mews.--The wicker baby-wagons.--The state equipages.
WE bought an umbrella,--every one buys an umbrella who goes to London,--and this, in its alpaca glory, became our constant companion. We purchased a guide-book to complete our equipments; but so disreputable, so yellow-covered, was its outward appearance, so suggestive of everything but facts, that we consigned it to oblivion, and put ourselves under the guidance of our Boston friends, the Good Man and his family.
For two busy weeks we rattled over the flat pavings of the city in the low, one-horse cabs. We climbed towers, we descended into crypts, we examined tombstones, we gazed upon mummies. Everything was new, strange, and wonderful, even to the little boys in the street, who, as well as the omnibus drivers, were decked out in tall silk hats--a piece of absurdity in one case, and extravagance in the other, to our minds. The one-horse carriages rolled about upon two wheels; the occupants, like cross children, facing in every direction but the one they were going, and everybody, contrary to all our preconceived ideas of law and order, turned to the left, instead of to the right,--to say nothing of other strange and perplexing ways that came under our observation. We had come abroad upon the same errand as the bears who "went over to Charlestown to see what they could see," and so stared into every window, into every passing face, as though we were seeking the lost. We became known as the women who wanted a cab; our appearance within the iron posts that guard the entrance to Queen's Square from Southampton Row being the signal for a perfect Babel of unintelligible shouts and gesticulations down the long line of waiting vehicles, with the charging down upon us of the first half dozen in a highly dangerous manner. Wisdom is sometimes the growth of days; and we soon learned to dart out in an unexpected moment, utterly deaf and blind to everything and everybody but the first man and the first horse, and thus to go off in triumph.