_Once More in London._ I am not one of those who touch the posts by Temple Bar with that rare delight which betrays the true-blue Londoner. Foreign scenes are ever a safer tonic to me than any fret and striving of our own cities; and gladly as I turn to London sometimes, it is rarely that I do not quit her shadows with a greater pleasure. Perhaps I am conscious of a subtle change creeping upon her, and destroying much of her charm. To me she seems as the great growing child which has lost its strength in the act. Vast beyond all belief, her energies are perceptibly weakening. She is no longer an example to the provinces; they do not imitate her fashions, and are ready to scoff at her pretensions. The old London of the gloomy theatres, the narrow, dirty streets, the London of Simpson’s and Evans’, and the decent supper rooms, was a thousand times more romantic a city in my eyes than this County Council Babylon, with its raucous prophets and its perpetual cant of moralities. Let the blame be on my head which dares to think such treason. I am lonely in wide streets, and the gospel of modernity depresses me. Unrepentant, I write these lines, and yet they can conjure up for me a vision of London so desired that all the years will never blot it from my memory. I had been in England two months then. A littered writing table in my private sitting-room at a great Strand hotel bore witness to my activities—an untasted elixir in a wineglass by my side spoke of a woman’s anxieties and of her devotion. Certainly my dear sister Harriet had sufficiently impressed upon these people the necessity of treating all carpets and curtains by an antiseptic process, and the profound wisdom of warming the interiors of those hats which subsequently were to adorn the heads of males. Her debates with a German Prince in command, neither understanding the tongue of the other, were a little protracted, and not always without heat. She was determined that I should not cut my finger-nails with unaired scissors, and convinced that the only way of saving me from the troubles which beset the path of my indifference lay in the frequent administration of advertised tonics, and a just sampling of the whole of them. I suffered her and was happy. Is it not something that there should be one woman in all the world who lives for us a life so wholly unselfish that no thought of her own needs ever enters into it?