become richly suggestive. It sounds rather absurd to say so, but all this sordid detail reminds me of nothing less than the wealth and power of the British empire at large; so that a kind of metaphysical picturesqueness hovers over the scene, and supplies what may be literally wanting. I don't exactly understand the association, but I know that when I look off to the left at the East India Docks, or pass under the dark, hugely-piled bridges, where the railway trains and the human processions are for ever moving, I feel a kind of imaginative thrill. The tremendous piers of the bridges, in especial, seem the very pillars of the British empire. It is doubtless owing to this habit of obtrusive reverie that the sentimental tourist thinks it very fine to see the Greenwich Observatory lifting its two modest little brick towers. The sight of this useful edifice gave me an amount of pleasure which may at first seem unreasonable. The reason was, simply, that I used to see it as a child in woodcuts in school geographies, and in the corners of large maps which had a glazed, sallow surface, and which were suspended in unexpected places, in dark halls and behind doors. The maps were hung so high that my eyes could reach only to the lower corners, and these corners usually contained a print of a strange-looking house standing among trees upon a grassy bank that swept down before it with the most engaging steepness. I used always to think that it must be an ineffable joy to run straight down that bank. Close at hand was usually something printed about something being at such and such a number of degrees "east of Greenwich." Why east of Greenwich? The vague wonder that the childish mind felt on this point gave the place a mysterious importance, and seemed to put it into relation with the difficult and fascinating parts of geography--the countries of fantastic outline and the lonely-looking pages of the atlas. Yet there it stood the other day, the spot from which longitude is calculated; there was the plain little façade with the old-fashioned cupolas; there was the bank on which it would be so delightful not to be able to stop running. It made me feel terribly old to find that I did not forthwith proceed to taste of this delight. There are indeed a great many steep banks in Greenwich Park, which tumbles up and down in the most picturesque fashion. It is a charming place, rather shabby and footworn, as befits a strictly popular resort, but with a character all its own. It is filled with magnificent dwarfish chestnut trees, planted in long, convergent avenues, with trunks of extraordinary girth and limbs that fling a dusky shadow far over the grass; there are plenty of benches, and there are deer as tame as sleepy children; and from the tops of the bosky hillocks there are views of the widening Thames, and the moving ships, and the two classic inns by the waterside, and the great pompous buildings of the old hospital, which have been