appropriately recognize his importance, he finds you a place in a moment. The stations on the “Underground” are open to the surface and are light and airy, but when the train plunges under London, and the compartment fills up with the gases, that have been accumulating down here for the past thirty years, you realize that traveling on the “Underground” does not differ widely from suicide by slow asphyxiation. The “delegate” put his silk handkerchief to his nostrils and looked suspiciously at me. It requires some ten minutes to make the distance between King’s Cross and Paddington, so he was unable to hold his breath all the way. Every time he breathed I felt as if I had murdered a man. My Tennessee friend and the Kentucky parson were not yet disposed to be critical, so they chatted merrily, breathed regularly, and acted as though these sulphur laden fumes were their “native air.” But after we had quitted Paddington station, and the train had taken its last few plunges under ground; when we had actually shaken off the dust and grime and roar of London, the beauty of the incomparable English landscape began to make us glad. Patchwork hillsides, where tiny fields are partitioned off by greenest hedges, lovely valleys, where brimming streams shimmer their length along, came, one by one, into view. The English streams have no visible banks. The turf, green as an emerald, grows clear to the water’s brink and dangles its luxuriant growth into the quiet brook, as a barefoot boy, playing truant, cools his feet in some wayside stream, while the master’s wrath grows warm. These rivers—for rivers I must call them, though a good athlete might almost leap from side to side—are always full and seem as though the accidental dropping in of a pebble would make them overflow. As hill and valley, hedge and garden, country home and quiet hamlet, all of surpassing loveliness, swept past us, my entire party began to fall under the spell of this exquisite beauty, and I felt that there had arisen the unanimous, though unexpressed, conviction that now, at last, the self-appointed guide was earning his salary. [Illustration: WINDSOR CASTLE FROM THE THAMES. ]