I am speaking now of the elements which the Almighty alone can control, and which only we strangers first see, as the surface of things, when we enter a foreign land, and before our letters of introduction, or the kind invitations of strangers, have led us into the participation of the hospitable and refined comforts prepared and enjoyed by the ingenuity of enlightened man, within. These I soon found were all around me, in the midst of this gloom; and a deep sense of gratitude will often induce me to allude to them again in the future pages of this work. My breakfast and a clean face were the first necessary things accomplished at my hotel, and next to them was my first sally into the streets of the great metropolis, to inhale the pleasure of first impressions, and in my rambles to get a glance at the outer walls and the position of the famous Egyptian Hall, which I have already said my kind friend the Hon. C. A. Murray had conditionally secured, as the locale of my future operations. It is quite unnecessary, and quite impossible also, for me to describe the route I pursued through the mud and the fog in search of the Hall. Its direction had been pointed out to me at my start, and something like the distance explained, which, to an accustomed woodsman like myself, seemed a better guarantee of success than the names of a dozen streets and turnings, &c.; and I had "leaned off" on the point of compass, as I thought, without any light of the sun to keep me to my bearings, until I thought myself near its vicinity, and at a proper position to make some inquiry for its whereabouts. I ran against a young man at the moment (or, rather, he ran against me, as he darted across the street to the pavement, with a black bag under his arm), whom I felt fully at liberty to accost; and to my inquiry for the Egyptian Hall, he very civilly and kindly directed me in the following manner, with his hand pointing down the street in the opposite direction to the one in which I was travelling:--"Go to the _bottom_, d'ye see, sir, and you are at the _top_, of Piccadilly; you then pass the third turning to the left, and you will see the hexibition of the uge hox; that hox is in the Hegyptian All, and ee _his_ a wapper, sure enough!" By this kind fellow's graphic direction I was soon in the Hall, got a glance of it and "the fat ox," and then commenced my first peregrination, amidst the mazes of fog and mud, through the Strand, Fleet-street, and Cheapside; the names of which had rung in my ears from my early boyhood, and which the sort of charm they had wrought there had created an impatient desire to see.