Again, I followed my father down many flights of steps, into the bowels of the earth; but there were lights there, and presently we passed through a sort of turnstile, and saw lengthening out before us two endless open tubes, of diameter twice or thrice the height of a man, with people walking in them, and disappearing in their interminable perspective. We, too, entered and began to traverse them, and after we had proceeded about half-way my father told me that the river Thames was flowing over our heads, with its ships on its surface, and its fishes, and its bottom of mud and gravel--under all these this illuminated corridor, with ourselves breathing and seeing and walking therein. Would we ever again behold the upper world and the sky? The atmosphere was not pleasant, and I was glad to find myself climbing up another flight of stairs and emerging on the other side of the river, which we had crossed on foot, dry-shod. Of the famous personages of this epoch I did not see much; only I remember that a woman who seemed taller than common, dressed in a dark silk gown, and moving with a certain air of composure, as if she knew she was right, and yet meant to be considerate of others; whose features were plain, and whose voice had a resonance and modulation unlike other voices, was spoken of in my hearing as bearing a name which I had heard often, and which had a glamour for my boyish imagination--Jenny Lind. There also rises before me the dark, courteous visage and urbane figure of Monckton Milnes; but there was something more and better than mere courtesy and urbanity about him; the inner luminousness, I suppose, of what was nearly genius, and would have been altogether that but for the swaddling-clothes of rank and society which hampered it. My father thought him like Longfellow; but there was an English materialism about Milnes from which the American poet was free. Henry James told me long afterwards a comical tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's library one afternoon, he strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting volumes, in sweet bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified by the discovery that he was enmeshed in the toils of what bibliophiles term, I think, "Facetiae"--of which Milnes had a collection unmatched among private book-owners. Milnes's social method was The Breakfast, which he employed constantly, and nothing could be more agreeable--in England; we cannot acclimate it here, because we work in the afternoon. Of Miss Bacon, of the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory, I saw nothing, but heard much, for a time, in our family circle; my father seemed to have little doubt of her insanity, and absolute certainty of the despotic attitude she adopted towards her supporters, which was far more intolerable than the rancor which she visited on those who disregarded her monomaniacal convictions. My mother, out of pure compassion, I believe, for the isolated and tragic situation in which the poor woman