Next morning our guide awaited us at our rendezvous at the appointed hour. We explored London thoroughly, crossing it from beginning to end with the underground railway and other conveyances. It was mid-summer, the season for London; in the streets it is all haste and crowding, thousands and thousands of people all hurrying to some place or other. Especially the crossing of the London Bridge, ploughed in all directions by omnibuses, cabs and private carriages, all tearing this way and that, made my head swim. We both drove and walked a good deal. The streets are very dangerous to cross; our old guide went before us, bent in two, one hand behind his back holding a stick. He was not very reassuring and said that in London, according to statistics, about a dozen persons were run over in the streets by carriages every day. In the City, the business part of the town, the heavy market waggons drawn by great powerful cart-horses especially attracted my attention. We did a great deal of sight-seeing that day. We began with the Kensington Museum where we saw, amongst the many treasures which the museum contains, the first engine constructed by Stephenson, named by him “The Rocket.” On leaving the museum we were privileged to see one of the most interesting sights of London, the Houses of Parliament, on the roof of which a lamp, the symbol of watchfulness and vigilance, is burning continually. On our way from there to Madame Tussaud’s wax-figure show, we passed the noseless statue of Queen Anne. This damage was done by a hooligan who, profiting by the fog, climbed up the statue with the intention of mutilating it, but he had only time to cut off the nose when the fog cleared away suddenly and the miscreant was laid hold of. In the main hall of Madame Tussaud’s Museum an orchestra was playing. Amongst the many wax-figures we saw groups of Royalties in the robes and jewels of other times. We were in the company of all the remarkable old Kings and Queens of England and France. We stopped before William the Conqueror, asking Matilda of Flanders to sit down, and Richard Cœur de Lion in domestic argument with sweet Berengaria, whom Madame Tussaud describes in the catalogue as a “Fair flower of Navarre.” Feeling thirsty we entered a bar-room, where we took a sherbet. The waitresses who served there were negligently dressed, with their fringes kept in curling-pins. Their reign only begins at night, when they put on their best attire and try to make themselves irresistible to their customers. Still indefatigable, we went to visit Westminster Abbey, and saw the hall in the Temple where Shakespeare played before Queen Elizabeth. After that we had a stand up sixpenny lunch in a small and rather shabby establishment, which consisted of one room only, where a white-aproned cook fried mutton-chops served to us on a marble table on which table-cloth and serviettes were conspicuous by their absence.