It was a matter of some regret to poppa that Messrs. Pink & Pink were bachelors, and could not very well be expected to exert themselves for me personally on that account; two Mrs. Pinks, he thought, might have done a little to make it pleasant for me in London, and would, probably, have put themselves out more or less to do it. But there was no Mrs. Pink, so I was indebted to these gentlemen for money only, which they sent me whenever I wrote to them for it, by arrangement with poppa. I was surprised, therefore, to receive one morning an extremely polite note from Messrs. Pink & Pink, begging me to name an afternoon when it would be convenient for me to call at their office, in order that Messrs. Pink & Pink might have the honour of discussing with me a matter of private business important to myself. I thought it delightfully exciting, and wrote at once that I would come next day. I speculated considerably in the meantime as to what the important private matter could possibly be--since, beyond my address, Messrs. Pink & Pink knew nothing whatever of my circumstances in London--but did not tell Lady Torquilin, for fear she would think she ought to come with me, and nothing spoils an important private matter like a third person. '1st Floor, Messrs. Dickson & Dawes, Architects; 2nd Floor, Norwegian Life Insurance Co.; 3rd floor, Messrs. Pink & Pink, Solicitors,' read the framed directory inside the door in black letters on a yellow ground. I looked round in vain for an elevator-boy, though the narrow, dark, little, twisting stairway was so worn that I might have known that the proprietors were opposed to this innovation. I went from floor to floor rejoicing. At last I had found a really antique interior in London; there was not a cobweb lacking in testimony. It was the very first I had come across in my own private investigations, and I had expected them all to be like this. Four or five clerks were writing at high desks in the room behind the frosted-glass door with 'Pink & Pink' on it. There was a great deal of the past in this room also, and in its associations--impossible to realise in America--which I found gratifying. The clerks were nearly all elderly, for one thing--grey-headed men. Since then I've met curates of about the same date. The curates astonished me even more than the clerks. A curate is such a perennially young person with us. You would find about as many aged schoolboys as elderly curates in America. I suppose our climate is more favourable to rapid development than yours, and they become full-fledged clergymen or lawyers after a reasonable apprenticeship. If not, they must come within the operation of some evolutionary law by which they disappear. America is a place where there is very little room for anachronisms.