I have wandered very far from the potential little tables for ices in--where shall I say?--in Oxford street; but, after all, there is no reason why our imagination should hover about them. I am afraid they would not be very pleasant. In such matters everything hangs together, and I am afraid that the customs of the Boulevard des Italiens and the Piazza Colonna would not harmonize with the scenery of the great London thoroughfare. A gin-palace right and left and a detachment of the London rabble in an admiring semicircle,--these, I confess, strike me as some of the more obvious features of the affair. At this time, however, one's social studies must, at the least, be studies of low life, for wherever you may go for a stroll or to spend your summer afternoon the unfashionable side of things is uppermost. There is no one in the parks save the rough characters who are lying on their faces in the sheep-polluted grass. These people are always tolerably numerous in the Green Park, through which I frequently pass, and I never fail to drop a wondering glance upon them. But your wonder will go far if it begins to bestir itself on behalf of weary British tramps. You see among them some magnificent specimens of weariness. Their velveteen legs and their colossal high-lows, their purple necks and car-tips, their knotted sticks and little greasy hats, make them look like stage villains in a realistic melodrama. I may do them great injustice, but I always assume that they have had a taste of penal servitude--that they have paid the penalty of stamping on some one with those huge square heels that are turned up to the summer sky. But, actually, they are innocent enough, for they are sleeping as peacefully as the most accomplished philanthropist, and it is their look of having walked over half England, and of being confoundedly hungry and thirsty, that constitutes their romantic attractiveness. These six feet of brown grass are their present sufficiency, but how long will they sleep, whither will they go next, and whence did they come last? You permit yourself to wish that they might sleep for ever and go nowhere else at all.