It was one of those little incidents which can occur only in an old society--a society in which every one that a newcomer meets strikes him as having in some degree or other a sort of historic identity, being connected with some one or something that he has heard of. If they are not the rose, they have lived more or less near it. There is an old English song-writer whom we all know and admire--whose songs are sung wherever the language is spoken. Of course, according to the law I just hinted at, one of the gentlemen sitting opposite must be his great-grandson. After dinner there are songs, and the gentleman trolls out one of his ancestral ditties with the most charming voice and the most finished art. I have still other memories of Greenwich, where there is a charming old park, on a summit of one of whose grassy undulations the famous observatory is perched. To do the thing completely, you must take passage upon one of the little grimy sixpenny steamers that ply upon the Thames, perform the journey by water, and then, disembarking, take a stroll in the park to get up an appetite for dinner. I find an irresistible charm in any sort of river-navigation, but I am rather at a loss as to how to speak of the little voyage from Westminster Bridge to Greenwich. It is in truth the most prosaic possible form of being afloat, and to be recommended rather to the inquiring than to the fastidious mind. It initiates you into the duskiness, the blackness, the crowdedness, the intensely commercial character of London. Few European cities have a finer river than the Thames, but none certainly has expended more ingenuity in producing an ugly river-front. For miles and miles you see nothing but the sooty backs of warehouses, or perhaps they are the sooty fronts: in these rigidly-unfeatured edifices it is impossible to distinguish. They stand massed together on the banks of the wide, turbid stream, which is fortunately of too opaque a quality to reflect their hideousness. A damp-looking, dirty blackness is the universal tone. The river is almost black, and is covered with black barges: above the black housetops, from among the far-stretching docks and basins, rises a dusky wilderness of masts. The little puffing steamer is dingy and begrimed: it belches a sable cloud that keeps you company as you go. In this carboniferous shower your companions, who belong chiefly, indeed, to the less brilliant classes, assume an harmonious dinginess; and the whole picture, glazed over with the glutinous London mist, becomes a masterpiece of bituminous-looking color. But it is very impressive in spite of its want of lightness and brightness, and in its own sombre fashion it is extremely picturesque. Like so many of the aspects of English civilization that are untouched by elegance or grace, it has the merit of being serious. Viewed in this intellectual light, the polluted river, the sprawling barges, the dead-faced warehouses, the dreary people, the atmospheric impurities,