And perhaps it is not ignorance so profound as this that is qualified to see and understand what is best. The girls read the names on the monuments with a kind of silent ecstasy of wonder. To think that they, two little girls from Canada, should actually be treading the storied pavement in Poets’ Corner, and should be able to read with their own eyes the names upon those monuments, and see the Kings and Queens lying in marble, in solemn state, and touch with their little living modern fingers the chair in which the Confessor had sat! Could anything be more wonderful? They went through it all as if they were in a dream, looking at the monuments, reading all the names, thinking it was their own want of clear historical knowledge that made them at a loss about one here and there. But the Abbey itself was above their comprehension. They thought the Houses of Parliament finer, and were a little shocked that everything should be so grey and old. When you have seen nothing that is not new, all your life, it is difficult to understand the darkening of ages. But they spent the entire morning in one dream of pleasure, their hearts standing still as they came upon name after name, which they had heard of all their lives. There too was Whitehall, and that gloomy window, of which, perhaps, it is not true that from thence King Charles stepped to his execution; but they were not too critical; and they walked up the Mall to St James’s Palace with a little thrill of easier admiration (which they thought rather vulgar in themselves, and were disposed to blush at) for the Lifeguardsmen on their horses. The little dingy old palace wounded their feelings somewhat, and brought down the bewildering splendour of imagination into very shabby limits; but they got over that. When they were not silent with awe, or with the shock of trying to reconcile to their own ideal something that fell short of it, they were talking all the way, calling upon each other to see this or that, reading out even the names of the streets to each other with many an “Oh, Milly!” and “Oh, Grace!” They were so absorbed in their sight-seeing that they never noticed the people who looked after them, the amused admiring looks with which the passers-by would contemplate their fresh faces. They were very fresh faces, delicate in colour, clear and animated, and so full of interest that their superabundant life brightened the foggy street. But fortunately the fog had lifted a little, and all the ghostly houses round the park, and the leafless trees, became more real under the mid-day radiance of a veiled sun doing his best to break through; and if they had thought the fog poetical before, you may imagine what they thought it now, with those rays streaming into it. It could not be real, they said to each other; by-and-by they would wake up and find themselves, let us say, in that other London which is on the farther side of the Atlantic. It could not be real; it was too wonderful to be true.