“At St. Paul’s I saw all the wonders of the place, whispered in the whispering gallery, and walked up the tottering wooden stairs, not into the ball itself but to the circular balustrade of the highest gallery beneath it. I have never been there since, but I can still recall most vividly that wonderful panorama: the strange diminution produced by the distance, the toy-like carriages and horses, and men and women moving noiselessly through the toy-like streets.... Looking back to that [scene] what strikes me most is the small dimensions to which the capital of England was then confined. When I stood on the topmost gallery of St. Paul’s I saw a compact city spreading along the river, it is true, from Billingsgate to Westminster, but clearly defined to the north and to the south, the West-End beginning at Hyde Park on the one side and the Green Park on the other. Then Belgravia was a series of pastures and Paddington a village. “We proceeded to the Tower, that place so striking by force of contrast ... the jewels and the armoury glittering ... amidst the gloom of the old fortress and the stories of great personages imprisoned, beheaded, buried within its walls;—a dreary thing it seemed to be a queen! But at night I went to Astley’s, and I forgot the sorrows of Lady Jane Grey and Anne Boleyn in the wonders of the horsemanship and the tricks of the clown.” Into the last day were crowded visits to the Houses of Lords and Commons, to Westminster Abbey, to Cox’s Museum in Spring Gardens, to the Leverian Museum in the Blackfriars Road, and finally at night to the theatre once more, returning home on the morrow “without a moment’s weariness of mind or body.” About this time Lord Charles Murray-Aynsley, a younger son of the Duke of Athol, became engaged to be married to a cousin of the Mitfords. “Lord Charles, as fine a young man as one should see in a summer’s day, tall, well-made, with handsome features ... and charming temper, had an infirmity which went nigh to render all [his] good gifts of no avail; a shyness, a bashfulness, a timidity most painful to himself and distressing to all about him.... That a man with such a temperament, who could hardly summon courage to say ‘How d’ye do?’ should ever have wrought himself up to the point of putting the great question was wonderful.... I myself, a child not five years old, one day threw him into an agony of blushing by running up to his chair in mistake for my papa. Now I was a shy child, a very shy child, and as soon as I arrived in front of his lordship and found that I had been misled by a resemblance of dress, by the blue coat and buff waistcoat, I first of all crept under the table, and then flew to hide my face in my mother’s lap; my poor fellow-sufferer, too big for one place of refuge, too old for the other, had nothing for it but to run away, which, the door being luckily open, he happily accomplished.” CHAPTER V LYME REGIS