It was early in the afternoon of a bright May day. Even for that season London seemed unusually crowded. In Regent street the difficulty was to move forward at all, and in Pall Mall and the Strand matters were not much better. Woe to the unlucky foreigners or country cousins who found crossing the street an absolute necessity! They might have been seen generally at the most crowded spots, shivering on the brink of what for the moment was worse than the vague, shadowy Jordan of the pilgrims, and too often submitting ignominiously to the guidance of that being almost superhuman in his callous indifference to rattling wheels and horses' heads--the policeman. But in and about a certain corner of Charing Cross the crowd seemed to culminate. To tell of the pedestrians of every shade and hue, the carriages, the omnibuses, which kept up a constant stream in this direction, would take volumes, for the Exhibition of the Royal Academy had only been open a week, and had not, therefore, lost the first charm of novelty. Thither many were hastening, mostly ladies of the fashionable class, gayly dressed in all the freshness of early summer coloring. But those who thronged to the Royal Academy on this May afternoon were not all of the fashionable class; there were besides some who went from a true love of art, a patient thirst for the beautiful--pale students, whose eyes had long grown used to dusky streets, and to whom the yearly vision of the something that always lies beyond was a revelation and a power; governesses and female artisans who had taken a holiday for the express purpose of enjoying the image of that which hard reality had denied to them. Many of these were shabbily dressed, and pallid from the wasting effects of hard work and care; they enjoyed, however, more perhaps than their brilliant sisters, who could glibly criticise this style and that, with the true art-jargon and an appearance of intimate knowledge, but to whom this, that charmed those others, was only a matter of course, a somewhat tiresome routine, that must of necessity be performed as a part of the season's work.