The British Museum occupied my time for hours, and I shall not undertake to give a catalogue of the things I saw there, but will mention a few of them. There are manuscripts of early writers in the English tongue, including a copy of Beowulf, the oldest poem in the language; autograph works of Daniel De Foe, Ben Jonson, and others; the original articles of agreement between John Milton and Samuel Symmons relating to the sale of the copyright of "a poem entitled 'Paradise Lost.'" There was a small stone inscribed in Phoenician, with the name of Nehemiah, the son of Macaiah, and pieces of rock that were brought from the great temple of Diana at Ephesus; a fragment of the Koran; objects illustrating Buddhism in India; books printed by William Caxton, who printed the first book in English; and Greek vases dating back to 600 B.C. In the first verse of the twentieth chapter of Isaiah we have mention of "Sargon, the king of Assyria." For centuries this was all the history the world had of this king, who reigned more than seven hundred years before Christ. Within recent times his history has been dug up in making excavations in the east, and I saw one of his inscribed bricks and two very large, human-headed, winged bulls from a doorway of his palace. The carvings from the palace of Sennacherib, tablets from the library of Asur-Banipal, and brick of Ur-Gur, king of Ur about twenty-five centuries before Christ, attracted my attention, as did also the colossal left arm of a statue of Thotmes III., which measures about nine feet. The Rosetta stone, by which the Egyptian hieroglyphics were translated, and hundreds of other objects were seen. In the mummy-room are embalmed bodies, skeletons, and coffins that were many centuries old when Jesus came to earth, some of them bearing dates as early as 2600 B.C., and in the case of a part of a body found in the third pyramid the date attached is 3633 B.C. Being weary, I sat down, and my note book contains this entry: "1:45 P.M., August 20. Resting here in the midst of mummies and sarcophagi thousands of years old." From the top of the Monument I took a bird's-eye view of the largest of all earthly cities, or at least I looked as far as the smoky atmosphere would permit, and then returned to my stopping place at Twynholm. As I rode back on the top of an omnibus, the houses of one of the Rothschild family and the Duke of Wellington were pointed out. My sight-seeing in Scotland and England was now at an end, and the journey so far had been very enjoyable and highly profitable. I packed up and went down to Harwich, on the English Channel, where I embarked on the Cambridge for Antwerp, in Belgium. In this chapter I have purposely omitted reference to my association with the churches, as that will come up for consideration in another chapter. CHAPTER II. CROSSING EUROPE.