"Poor Mrs. Smith bore up very well until it came to the last, and then, you know, when it came quite to the last-" &c. Away they go with half-a-dozen satin shoes flying after them; but for their peace of mind and common-sense's sake, we hope not with the new luggage visible, nor yet driven by that aged, shabby, dismally-conspicuous, inconvenient relic of olden times a post-boy. And the guests mercifully follow them as soon as they can with civility.

Welcome, peace! Welcome, old, yea, even raffy clothes! an easy chair, a cup of tea, perchance a doze! Listen dreamily to the comments on, and criticisms of, the day's doings. Hear how gratified is Materfamilias with the confectioner's arrangements, with the bouquets, the general effect in the church, and young Simpkins's attention in coming in his mother's brougham instead of in a common cab; it showed such Proper Respect.

What's this? A telegram for the good lady! "Oh, my goodness, dears! If the train should have blown up! Here, Joe, my glasses are upstairs in my other pocket, do you read it aloud."

"Send, first train, keys left on mantelpiece. Have had locks forced

Will write to-morrow. Our love."

London, as it strikes a Stranger.

TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SOUTH AFRICAN HERALD."

IN fulfilment of my promise, I hasten to write you my first impressions of the Great Metropolis, to which, after a whole life of hope and expectation, I have at last accomplished my pilgrimage. I have experienced the oft-imagined sensation of the stranger, born three, five, ten, or twenty thousand miles away, when his foot first presses the soil of his fatherland, where rests the dust of his ancestors, back to the remote and perhaps unknown past. All round the world England has colonies and dependencies, and there are millions not politically related to Great Britain whose mother-tongue is English, whose ancestry was English, whose laws and literature are English, and to whom England is the most interesting of countries, and London the central metropolis of the world.

The boy whose eyes first opened to the light on the banks of the St. Lawrence, or the shores of blue Ontario, or by the Hudson or the Mississippi, or on the far Pacific or Indian seas, dreams that some day he will see London, where Shakespeare and De Foe lived once, and which is now the home of the living authors he loves best. He may have been born at the Cape of Good Hope, or in India, or Australia, but his thoughts turn ever to the rock-bound garden island, pressed by the feet of his progenitors, the land whose history was their life, whose monuments are their power, whose literature is their thought, whose institutions embody their wisdom and experience. I have seen cities which have sprung up in the wilderness with a wonderful rapidity, and some of them have wealth, splendour, refinement, and luxury; but what are these capitals of yesterday to the one great emporium of the world-the seat of empire and the centre of thought for all whose thoughts find their natural expression in our conquering Anglo-Saxon? The interests of the whole English race, with all it has absorbed and is fast absorbing, and wherever scattered over two hemispheres in orbe terrarum, are centered in London. In spite of distance, and even of political divisions, it is their real, and only real, capital. Here is the focus of English history, literature, science, and arts; here the centre of the commerce which is civilising and subjugating the world. London books go wherever men can read the English language; London magazines are on the tables of every reading-room; and the London newspaper is the only one which has a universal circulation.

With these thoughts, as our good ship entered the British Channel, I caught my first glimpse of the white cliffs of Albion. From Lizard's Point to Isle of Wight I watched for the shore. There is the famed Eddystone Lighthouse. The Jersey Isles are dim specks on the southern horizon. Now the chalky cliffs are glittering in the sun, and I would gladly pierce them with my glass for one glimpse of Osborne, the happy winter palace

of England's Royal Lady. Was there ever such a voyage as this first trip up the Channel? Down comes a mist, and tall ships brush by like great birds; you hold your breath a moment, and they are gone. The strangely rigged pilot-boats hover round us. From one of them the eldest son of Neptune comes on board, and we feel safe again. Then comes a burst of sunshine, and the captain wishes he had not been in such a hurry to get a pilot.

The white cliffs, the fields of emerald green, the lovely villas of England's fair southern shore, pass by like a moving panorama. The Channel narrows, until we can see both shores. There are the cliffs of Dover, and the town itself lying snugly beneath. There is Shakespeare's Cliff which

we have pictured to our minds so often, and yonder is the first old feudal castle we have ever seen. It is only once in a lifetime the old and new can so come together. We will not linger at the quaint old towns along the coast. We pass the Forelands; we are in the Thames! Under the light of a mellow moon we glide into the smoke and roar of the great City.

So far the romance of my arrival as it mingled with the reality. Our good ship warped into her dock, and I sprang ashore with that appreciation of solid land which one always feels after a long voyage, heightened by the feeling that I stood on English ground; and this feeling, in which mingled so many memories of the past, and so many hopes of the future, I will not venture to express. It was night, but I was in haste to see London, and passed quickly from the silence and obscurity of the wellordered dock-yard to the noise and glare of High Street, Shadwell, and Ratcliff Highway. The street is narrow and crooked, the buildings black and low, the shops small and crowded, the side-walks lined with small traders all crying their wares at the tops of their voices, amid the gleam of gas and the smoke of torches. Painted and bedizened women, or squalid and miserable ones, are gathered in noisy and drunken crowds around the doors of brilliant, brazen dram-shops, while sounds of music and revelry come from the dance-halls in the rear. This was my first glimpse of London; and I did not, as you may judge, chance upon its most reputable locality.

Reality but seldom comes up to the picturings of a long-excited imagination. All things of which we have formed great expectations are likely to disappoint us. We picture Niagara a deluge rushing from the skies. We find a river pouring over a ledge of rocks; and we are obliged to get rid of all our preconceived imaginings before we can enjoy its actual grandeur. Celebrated mountains always look too small. Celebrated buildings seem to shrink and dwarf themselves as we look at them. The picture "in the mind's eye" looms up above their diminished proportions. The ocean does not disappoint us, because we can never see it all. It is as vast as we can imagine it; and the ocean in a storm has an element of terror which exceeds both our wishes and expectations. For the same reason, earthquakes are all we can desire, and the

tornado is as terrible in its hour of wrath as imagination has ever conceived.

I had formed an idea of the vastness of a city which covers sixty square miles, whose circumference is a day's journey, whose population is equal to that of extensive colonies and powerful states. The size of London has not disappointed me, for the best of reasons,-I have never been able to see it all at once. There may be times when it is all visible from St. Paul's or the Monument. There may live those who have seen it all spread out from Primrose Hill or Highgate. I am not of the lucky number. I have seen a few square miles of blackened bricks and hideous chimney-pots, and all beyond has been an impenetrable cloud of smoke and dust and vapours. There is room enough under this smoky canopy for three millions of people and all the grandeurs of the great metropolis.

But if the vastness of London satisfies even the imagination, what shall I say of its other aspects and characteristics? In forming our idea of the great capital of the British Empire and of the nineteenth century, we naturally look for models in the great cities of the past, and the centres of other empires. We compare London with imperial Rome; and when we would express in one word the idea of her greatness, we call her "the Modern Babylon." It is natural, then, that in trying to form an idea of London we should think of that great Assyrian capital, with her lofty walls, her hundred brazen gates, her magnificent palaces, and wonderful hanging gardens. If we reject these oriental, and, it may be, fabulous splendours, we take ancient Rome as the model of our imagined modern great metropolis.

Rome and London! in how many things are they alike! Rome, like London, was the centre of a vast and powerful empire. Rome had no equal on the land, no rival on the sea. Rome lay upon the Tiber, close by the Mediterranean, as London upon the Thames, on the borders of the German Ocean. Rome crowned her seven hills with temples and palaces, whose glories flashed far under those blue and sunny skies. Thirteen great aqueducts, traversing the Campagna on lofty arches, poured as many rivers into the baths and fountains of the Eternal City, from whose centre radiated those great highways of nations, over which her vast armies marched to conquer the world, and which have lasted two thousand years. Her noble streets were lined with marble edifices-temples, theatres, and public baths, for the luxurious accommodation of her vast population. Every where were to be seen glorious architecture, beautiful columns, triumphal arches, and the statues of gods and heroes. A Roman theatre could seat seventy thousand spectators. The wealth of the world poured into Rome, and this wealth took forms of beauty and grandeur.

The Thames is larger than the Tiber. The ships and steamers which crowd her waters are larger and more powerful than the galleys of Rome; and I may be pardoned if I somehow formed the idea that a city so famed, so rich, so great, so powerful, would have streets, squares, public

buildings, monuments, parks, fountains, galleries, worthy of the capital of a great empire.

But all these ideas must be abandoned when you pass under this smoky canopy. London is the centre and expression of an empire not in the least like Babylon or Rome. Utility, personal comfort, and exclusiveness are written all over London. Most of the streets are narrow, crooked, and running in every possible direction. I am not deficient in locality, and can find my way in pathless forests; but I have tried to walk a mile in one direction through the maze of London, and after half an hour found myself forty rods on the wrong side of the place of beginning. Along these narrow streets there are hundreds of miles of plain, ugly houses, built of rough bricks of a brownish-yellow, blackened with smoke. In the more pretentious streets the bricks are covered with stucco, often cracked and shabby, lined, perhaps, into a sham of stone. I give the grimy honest bricks my hearty preference..

What seems very wonderful to me is the fact that, after an experience of so many centuries, the London bricklayer has not learned to build a chimney that will draw. In other portions of the world one may doubtless sometimes find a smoky chimney, as well as a scolding wife; but here the smoky chimney, instead of the exception, is the rule, and the chimneys all over London are topped out with every conceivable form of excrescence that can give clearness to the air within the dwellings and ugliness without. In the newest as well as the oldest districts, the richest as the poorest, there is the same twisted and tangled forest of pottery, iron or zinc pipes, growing out of the housetops. Never was seen such a vast and varied growth of sprouting ugliness. In Europe and America they are alike unknown; but here in London, whether you look from Primrose Hill or the Monument, or up at the palatial residences around Hyde Park, you see the same extraordinary ornamentation of blackened roofs, and hideous fringing of the murky horizon.

The first walk or ride-and here allow me to recommend the front outside seat of an omnibus, with an obliging coachman-through these narrow, dingy, and perplexing streets, is full of the most curious interest to the newly-arrived stranger. The names of the streets are those you have read from boyhood. They are the scenes of a hundred plays and story-books. The very names on the signs are familiar to you-as household words. There is a strange thrill of delighted recognition as you read on the corners, "Lombard Street," "Threadneedle Street," "Cheapside," where you look round for John Gilpin. How many horrors crowd upon the memory as you pass by Newgate and Old Bailey! At my first passage they were railing off a space in the open street, in front of the prison gates, within which space a man was to be hanged at an early hour the following morning. The crowd had begun to gather. The public-houses opposite were full, and looking forward to a whole night of roaring trade, with their windows and roofs all let at high prices, for the morning's ghastly spectacle. We drive on down Skinner Street, up