Lord Rosebery used 10, Downing Street, for official purposes; Lord Salisbury did not use it at all. Many historic scenes have been enacted, and many momentous questions settled, within its walls. It was in its entrance hall, trodden by the feet of successive generations of politicians, that Wellington and Nelson met for the only time in their lives, both waiting to see the Minister, and neither knowing who the other was. They naturally entered into conversation, but it was not until afterwards that they knew to whom they had been speaking. The house itself is solid and substantial, without any architectural attractiveness, and to the casual observer suggests nothing different from thousands of other London dwellings. From the outside, no one would imagine it to be commodious, but it has some very large apartments; and the old council chamber, the principal features of which are the book-lined walls, massive pillars, and heavy, solid furniture, remains much as it was in Walpole's day. Here many conferences of Ministers have been held, and the most delicate affairs of State settled. The Cabinet Councils have, however, not always been held here. Mr. Gladstone preferred to hold them in his own more cosy room on the floor above; and Lord Salisbury preferred to hold them at the Foreign Office. Next door is the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. The entrance to the Foreign Office and the Colonial Office is opposite. Which of these great buildings, with their numerous passages and annexes and waiting-rooms, is the original of Dickens's "Circumlocution Office," it would be invidious even to attempt to discover. Nowhere is the curious unexpectedness of London houses better exemplified than in the building known as Sir John Soane's Museum, on the north side of the square called Lincoln's Inn Fields. Here to all seeming, stands an ordinary dwelling-house;--its front, it is true, somewhat of the ornate kind,--but utterly misleading, so far as its outer appearance is concerned, to the passer-by. Nor does the illusion stop at the hall-door. For there is here an air of homely friendliness, of quiet welcome, that is altogether at variance with any preconceived ideas that the visitor may have formed about museums in general. Several dignified family servants of irreproachable demeanour lie in wait for the stranger and kindly escort him round. It is not till you have passed the Rubicon of the double dining-room, yet arranged exactly as in the lifetime of the founder, that you begin to realise that you are in a museum, not in a private mansion. And the realisation is even then difficult, for the family butlers have a familiar way of alluding to "Sir John," the donor, as though he were alive and in the next room, thus: