The difference between the English and French is admirably illustrated by two incidents somewhat similar in nature. It was our fortune to be in London on the occasion of the celebration of the Queen's birthday, a time that is always made a general holiday by all classes. Business was suspended, and every one gave himself up to pleasure--the kind of amusement that the Londoner considers pleasure. The bands were out, the military paraded, and all the parks were filled with people in holiday attire. [Sidenote: A HOLIDAY IN LONDON.] As the afternoon wore on it became apparent that there was some agency at work aside from devotion to royalty. There was a boisterousness that savored of strong beer and still stronger gin. The crowd of men and women who thronged the Strand and Regent street, and Piccadilly, laughed and shouted, not with the merry ring of pure pleasure, but with the maudlin utterances of semi-drunkenness. In the evening there was a grand illumination of the government buildings, the clubs and the prominent business houses. The streets were thronged with people--men, women, and children--all elbowing their way along, eager to see all that was to be seen, and willing to give no one an opportunity they themselves could not enjoy. It was a motley crowd, composed of all classes. The well-dressed shopman was jostled by the ragpicker; and ragged, homeless girls, arm in arm, shoved aside the elderly matron, who had come out with her children to see the illuminations. There were all classes and conditions of people, and they raved and tore about more like escaped lunatics than the staid, sober Britons they pride themselves upon being. A walk down Pall Mall was almost worth one's life. On this thoroughfare are located the principal clubs of London, and as they were rather brilliantly lighted with gas jets arranged in fanciful designs, the crowd flocked there to see them. The street was actually packed from curb to curb, so that locomotion was difficult. The illuminations were not on a scale grand enough to merit all this outpouring of people, this great hubbub, this drunkenness and gin-incited hilarity. For the most part the designs were simply the English coat of arms, with the letters "V. R." on each side, the whole being done in plain gas jets. Occasionally some thriving shop-keeper, who had made a little something from the Royal family, would branch out a little more extensively, and use tiny glass shades of different colors, over his gas. But it was dreary beyond measure. The streets were dark and gloomy, the air was close, and the so-called illuminations were so very, very meager that they made the general effect only more dismal.