number of its people, though its greatness is quite independent of this. The circle can be drawn to include four, six, or seven millions and it will still be true that the sustainers of its greatness come within a single million, possibly the half of that. Yet it has a few businesses useful for the novice to know. People have walked and ridden through the double tunnel under the wider part of the Thames since 1843. Its underground railway, costing five million dollars per mile to make, carries one hundred and fifty millions of people a year, and has been running forty years. The public are served by fifteen thousand cabs, which earn twenty-five million dollars a year. There are over one thousand omnibuses, not including tram-cars, on which there are roof seats, and you pay from two to six cents, according to distance. Steamboats afford a fine view of the city, at the same fares.

It has about five hundred theatres and music-halls, giving variety programmes. Many of these hold from three to five thousand and they are always well-filled. The roof of a famous music-hall built in 1870 slides off for a few minutes at a time, for ventilation on summer nights. The Crystal Palace entertains a hundred thousand people without being crowded, in its beautiful glass hall, 1,608 feet long, with two great aisles and transepts, and a charming pleasure park. In the palace are reproductions of ancient architecture, primitive peoples, extinct animals, everything in art and nature that can expand knowledge. The orchestra seats four thousand, the concert-hall four thousand, and the theatre four thousand, all under the same roof, yet their performances are simultaneous. The Palace cost over seven million dollars in 1854, and admission is twenty-five cents. The Albert Memorial Hall holds ten thousand. The Agricultural Hall covers three acres and a half, and holds audiences of twenty-five thousand.

There is not a day in the year without half-a-dozen or more public meetings, convened by religious, scientific, or other societies, a free field for the stranger to see distinguished people, hear average oratory, study character and customs, and lay in stores of useful knowledge with varied entertainment. “Doing the sights” is a matter of course, but they should be selected to suit one’s mood at the time, also the usually unlovely weather, and above all, after some preliminary guide-book reading. The Tower is already familiar in story and picture, yet not every cockney is aware that its walls enclose a virtual town of over three thousand inhabitants. It has a hundred distinct interests for the leisurely-minded, besides that of being a great old fortress. The new Tower bridge equals the underground railway and sub-river tunnels as a triumph of engineering, lifting itself high above the tall ships’ masts when they sail in and out of the port. Near by, the much maligned East End, the Whitechapel district beloved by horror-vending reporters, invites and will repay a visit.

Would you like to realize a dream of some magnificent pageant, in which the great notabilities of all the earth take a share? Take your stand where Rotten Row meets the Drive any morning or afternoon between April and July. Here meet the pink of fashion and the celebrities distinguished for honors won in art, science, diplomacy, statesmanship, and war. The outward and visible magnificence belongs to the horses rather than their riders and drivers, for plainness of attire and decoration is the rule among the great folks. This double daily parade is truly a unique spectacle, viewed by throngs of idlers of all nations, themselves a picturesque feature of the show.

A panorama with another sort of interest should be viewed ponderingly. Let the visitor approach Westminster Abbey from Victoria station along Victoria Street, once a worse than any Whitechapel nest of criminal slum-dwellers. Grouped into a picture unrivalled elsewhere in the world for architectural splendor combined with historic glory, he will see the hoary Abbey, not simply the stone record of a thousand years of human progress; not simply the petrified survival of druidicial worship in the forest groves, with its soaring tree-trunk columns breaking into foliage as their tops meet to screen the sun and echo down again the ascending incense of prayer and song; not simply the stately temple which for ages has been the shrine of England’s great ones, thirteen kings, fourteen queens, and the greater than these—the glorious array of its poets, musicians, statesmen, soldiers, sailors, and explorers, who, like Livingstone in his line and Chaucer in his, poured all their wealth of genius and power into the lap of their motherland, to make her happier and stronger. He will see through the mediæval stained windows the deeper meaning of the old church’s story, the reddened sun-rays telling of the bloodshed that watered the growing plant of the nation’s greatness, and the blue beams that figure Britannia’s olden mastery of the seas, and the rainbow hues suggestive of her labors to give hope to the people that long sat in darkness till she brought the light of civilization.

Close to the Abbey’s side stands the venerable St. Margaret’s parish church, where Caxton printed the first book and is buried; where Ambassador James Russell Lowell’s epitaph on Raleigh graces the window that honors the memory of Virginia’s founder, whose headless body reposes in its precincts. Just behind the two churches stands Westminster Hall, as King William Rufus built it in 1099, though its great oak-beam roof was heightened by Richard II. Close behind it rises the majestic file of the Houses of Parliament, the great Victoria tower at one end, at the other the clock tower, with its minute-hand twelve feet long and its chimes that float around for miles. From its foot Westminster Bridge gladly crosses the Thames to the noblest of hospitals, St. Thomas’s, founded in 1213. Its separate blocks corridored together, fitly match the Parliament building on the opposite bank of the river. When you stand on the Abbey sidewalk, near the Beaconsfield statue, you may feel you are standing in the true centre of the earth, for there will pass you in the course of a week in the season the picked leaders of most nations, the representatives of every faith and system of government, the ruling men of Asiatic empires and tribes, and travellers from the world’s end to do homage to the mother of parliaments and the shrine of the immortal dead. And far in the distant haze hovers the dome of St. Paul’s like a balloon ascending through the smoke clouds to the clear blue.

Starting westward from the Abbey, in this sacred bit of the great city, it is possible to walk seven miles on the grass and paths, through St. James’s park, surrounded by Government buildings, stately old mansions, the home of the king when Prince of Wales, St. James’s Palace, and Buckingham Palace. Then along Constitution Hill, across Piccadilly into Hyde Park, along Rotten Row (from Route du Roi) to Kensington Gardens with the house Victoria was born in, and so on, with a few breaks. The group of palatial museums at South Kensington tempt the stranger, whatever his tastes or culture, to spend a year there, and each year so spent will need another to do justice to their marvellous contents.

Turn back now, along Piccadilly, a unique panorama in itself, pass the cluster of great restaurants, theatres, music-halls, and other pleasure places that reach half a mile or so towards the Strand, where the hotels range round Charing Cross. Along this narrow but brilliant highway lie more theatres and a famous church or two, and the cold bath in use since the Romans made it two thousand years ago. Then up Fleet Street, whence the daily papers flutter morning, noon and night, until St. Paul’s crowns the highest bit of the