The Gondolier had his own way; and, while the sparrows were still twittering and the housemaids were taking in the milk and the Sunday paper, I was well on my road to Rosebank. This much I will concede to the curiosity of readers--that my road led me out of London in a south-easterly direction, by the Horseferry, where James II. dropped the Great Seal into the Thames, along the Old Kent Road, of which a modern minstrel sang; past Kennington Common, now a "Park," where the gallant Jacobites of '45 underwent the hideous doom of Treason, where the iron-shuttered windows still commemorate the Chartist rising of '48, and where Sackville Maine took his Sunday walk with Mrs. Sackville and old Mrs. Chuff. On past the "Hamlet of Dulwich," where Mr. Pickwick spent the last years of his honoured life, to Chislehurst, where Napoleon III. hid his exiled head, and North Cray, where the tragedy of Lord Londonderry's death is not yet forgotten, and Shooters' Hill, where Jerry Cruncher stopped the coach with the terrifying message of "Recalled to Life." Now, as readers are sometimes unduly literal, and as I would not willingly involve any one in an hour's fruitless puzzling over a map, let me say that this itinerary is rather general than particular, and that, although the Gondolier pursued an extremely devious course and murmured when I suggested straighter paths, we did not touch all the above-mentioned places in our morning's drive. But evermore we tended south-eastwards, and evermore the houses grew imperceptibly less dignified. Stone and stucco we had left behind us on the northern side of the river, and now it was a boundless contiguity of brick--yellow brick, rather grimy,--small houses with porticos, slips of dusty garden between the front door and the road, and here and there a row of wayside trees. But everywhere gas, and everywhere _omnibi_ (as the classical lady said,) and everywhere electric trams. Churches of every confession and every architecture lined the way, varied with Public-houses of many signs, Municipal Buildings of startling splendour (for Borough Councils have a flamboyant taste), and Swimming Baths and Public Libraries, and here and there a private Lunatic Asylum frowning behind suggestively solemn gates.