Parts of the grounds are cultivated with flowers, like Boston Common and Public Garden combined. Near this is Kensington Garden, and other similar places, making the West End of London remarkably favored in these respects. A long walk over one of the principal avenues of this place, and we were in the neighborhood of Buckingham Palace, the Queen's winter residence. It is a large, oblong building, of brown freestone, four stories high, and hotel-like in appearance. Back some hundred or more feet from the square, made by the junction of two or three great thoroughfares, it has a high but open iron fence enclosing the grounds. There are two principal gateways, and an amplitude of rear grounds and gardens. Many shops are within a minute's walk of the premises. Some portions of the vicinity are very aristocratic, like Grosvenor Square and its radiating streets, in which are palatial residences in close blocks. Contiguous to parks, and having the public thoroughfares about it, one hardly feels that this is the famed Buckingham Palace. We are aware that we have began to talk about London. We will, however, not promise anything like a formal description,--certainly, no complete one. London is great beyond description. All that will be undertaken is a statement of what we saw, with the addition of any fact that history may suggest as immediately interesting. Very clean are the streets. Never were better pavements, especially on the sidewalks. There is no look of the London we had pictured. We had expected too much of a frivolous Parisian look in London's West End. A few avenues were up to our anticipation; but _all_, even here, is not up to this high mark. There is nothing ancient in appearance; and yet nothing looks entirely new. We should judge that everything had been finished twenty years before, and left untouched. Some shade-trees, some flower-yards, a garden here and there, are to be seen; but generally all is solid and rich. A generous number of carriages and people are in the thoroughfares, but no great crowd. Imagine these things, and you have the aristocratic West End of London. We walked on, and soon in the distance caught a view of the towers of Westminster Abbey. We went through street after street, out of right-angles with each other, but not crooked nor very narrow; light and airy was the atmosphere, at this season free from smoke or the London fog. There was a Boston May-day look about everything. It was cool enough to make overcoats useful every day till the first of June. At 6 P. M. we had reached the abbey, and were a mile or more from our lodgings. The roads, or avenues, in the vicinity of the edifice are very wide, and form squares about its venerable grounds, the focus of a business centre. Nowhere, though, was there an over-crowded condition. At times there were crowds,--much more so than at others; but never what might be expected in the neighborhood of the Abbey, Parliament Houses, Westminster