But though Will Flynt was not insensitive to these fascinating phenomena, and even rode about recklessly in the cabriolets at eightpence a mile, yet London had not the spell to hold him. Only the Great Exhibition had drawn him across the Atlantic. While awaiting impatiently for the five-shilling day, he duly did the Tower and the Zoo (sixpence extra for Mr. Gould’s humming-birds in the twenty-five glass cases), paid twopence to go into St. Paul’s, and a shilling to see the Great Globe in Leicester Square, patronized Phelps at Sadler’s Wells, and the horses at Astley’s, had a peep at Vauxhall, enjoyed “Rush, the Norwich Murderer,” at Madame Tussaud’s, and submitted the boots these operations begrimed to the red-coated shoeblacks of the Ragged Schools—London’s new word in philanthropy. But though he liked the quarter in which his quaint galleried hotel, “The Flower Pot,” was situated, with the Spitalfields Market and the tall old houses of the silk-weavers, whose vast casements with their little panes rose story on story, he was no sooner through with the visit to the Exhibition than without a day’s delay—as promised in that letter to Martha—he took train and coach to Little Bradmarsh. Beholding him thus on the County Flyer hurrying towards Frog Farm, after only a single visit to the stupendous spectacle, one may suspect that he did not know his own heart as well as he imagined. But he himself had no doubt of the magnet he obeyed, and he had found on his boat not a few rich Canadians—and the Dominion already boasted four thousand carriage-folk—who confessed to have yielded to the same irresistible attraction. There was indeed little else talked of on the voyage: even the wonders of the boat itself—a new Yankee iron and screw steamer of nearly two thousand tons and quite five hundred horse-power that brought them to Liverpool in eleven days from Halifax, and had spittoons and wedding-berths like the Yankee river-steamers, and to see which the Liverpudlians had flocked with their sixpences—paling before the world-marvel awaiting them in London.