The poor Squire writes bitterly of London life: “I start every hour from my sleep at the horrid noise of the watchmen calling the hour through every street, and thundering at every door.” “If I would drink water I must quaff the mawkish contents of an open aqueduct, exposed to all manner of defilement, or swallow that which comes from the Thames, impregnated with all the filth of London and Westminster. Human excrement is the least offensive part of the concrete, which is composed of all the drugs, minerals and poisons used in mechanics and manufactures, enriched with the putrefying carcases of beasts and men, and mixed with the scourings of all the washtubs, kennels, and common sewers within the bills of mortality.” The City churches and churchyards were in my time constant sources of disease, and the chapels were, where they had burying-grounds attached, equally bad. One need not remark in this connection how much better off we are in our day. Again the Squire writes: “The bread I eat is a deleterious paste, mixed up with chalk, alum and bone ashes.” Here, again, we note gladly a change for the better. The vegetables taste of nothing but the dung-hills from whence they spring. The meat the Squire holds to be villainously bad, “and as for the pork, it is an abominable carnivorous animal fed with horseflesh and distillers’ grains, and the poultry is all rotten in consequence of fever, occasioned by the infamous practice of sewing up the guts, that they may be the sooner fattened in crops in consequence of this cruel restriction.” Then there is the butter, a tallowy, rancid mass, manufactured with candle grease and butcher’s stuff. Well, these enormities are permitted no longer, and that is a step gained. We have good water; the watchman is gone, and the policeman has taken his place; but London as I knew it was little better than it was in the Squire’s time. I fear in eggs we have not improved. The old Squire complains that they are imported from Scotland and France. We have, alas! for our fresh eggs to go a good deal further now. Milk, he tells us, was carried through the streets in open pails, exposed to foul rinsings discharged from doors and windows, and contaminated in many other ways too horrible to mention. No wonder the old Squire longed to get back to his old mansion in Wales, where, at any rate, he could enjoy pure water, fresh eggs and real milk. It is hard to conceive how the abominations he describes could have been tolerated an hour. There was no Holborn Viaduct—nothing but a descent into a valley—always fatal to horses, and for many reasons trying to pedestrians. One of the sights of London which I sorely missed was the Surrey Gardens, with its fireworks and half-starved and very limited zoological collection. It has long been built over, but many is the happy summer evening I have spent there witnessing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, or some other representation equally striking and realistic.