“If you are going to keep a journal at all, begin the minute you take off your waterproof.” This bit of wisdom descended upon the quartette from the lips of the special correspondent of the Perkinsville _Gazette_, one dripping morning when we found her taking notes in the British Museum. And surely she never said a wiser thing. First impressions may not be profound or correct, or reach in any way the heart and meaning of what passes under the eye, but they are the freshest and often the only impressions worth recording. One sees more in a first day in a new city than in many subsequent days. The eyes are open then, if ever, to all little peculiarities and characteristics; the ears catch every unfamiliar tone; the perceptions are quickened into a new and vivid interest, dissipated, alas, too soon! We Americans quickly make ourselves at home. The novelty of to-day is commonplace to-morrow, and the third day’s description of an event takes only a word, where the first day’s would have received a page. And there is no haunting demon of travel quite so fiendish as the journal that must be written, and that has “got behind.” One never can quite subdue its clamor, nor does any effort at writing up the half-forgotten record satisfy its insatiate demand. All the pith and the life are gone out of the neglected recollections, and we must accept the conclusion that it is NOT safe to wait after the “water-proof” is laid aside. That some members of our quartette _did_ wait was, perhaps, a mercy to their friends, for it would have taken a volume to describe what they saw and did in London. That they studied their guide-books, and maps and histories, as true Chautauquans should, goes without saying. They tramped a great many miles and jostled in cabs and omnibuses a great many more, and tried the tramways and the underground road, and the penny boats upon the noiseless highway of the Thames. Somewhere they had read that the united streets of London made a stretch of over three thousand miles, and they sometimes felt as if they had traversed them all. They must visit every portion of the city, for each had its peculiar interest or charm. How could they fail, for example, to drive through the aristocratic Belgravia, the district that, within the last quarter of a century, has become a region of fine streets and spacious squares and palatial residences, transforming as well as surpassing the old West End. It seemed worth while to gaze, if only from the windows of a cab, at the residences of the real aristocracy of Britain, and better worth while to drive on, through the once beautiful and rural Chelsea, now swarming with the multitudes of London’s poor. The old city of Westminster, now swallowed up in London, whose inhabitants average a dozen inmates to every wretched home, touches Belgravia on the southeast, lying, as one writer says, “Like a filthy beggar at the rich man’s gate.” Not all the efforts of public and private