“The servility of the shopkeepers is really a little offensive.  ’What shall I have the honor of showing you?’ they say.

“Our chambermaid, at our lodgings, thanks us every time we speak to her.

“I feel ashamed to reach a four-penny piece to a stout coachman who touches his hat and begs me to remember him.  Sometimes I am ready to say, ’How can I forget you, when you have hung around me so closely for half an hour?’

“Our waiter at the Adelphi Hotel, at Liverpool, was a very respectable middle-aged man, with a white neck-cloth; he looked like a Methodist parson.  He waited upon us for five days with great gravity, and then another waiter told us that we could give our waiter what we pleased.  We were charged L1 for ‘attendance’ in the bill, but I very innocently gave half as much more, as fee to the ‘parson,’

“August 14.  To-day we took a brougham and drove around for hours.  Of course we didn’t see London, and if we stay a month we shall still know nothing of it, it is so immense.  I keep thinking, as I go through the streets, of ’The rats and the mice, they made such a strife, he had to go to London,’ etc., and especially ’The streets were so wide, and the lanes were so narrow;’ for I never saw such narrow streets, even in Boston.

“We have begun to send out letters, but as it is ‘out of season’ I am afraid everybody will be at the watering-places.

THE GREENWICH OBSERVATORY.  “The observatory was founded by Charles II.  The king that ‘never said a foolish thing and never did a wise one’ was yet sagacious enough to start an institution which has grown to be a thing of might, and this, too, of his own will, and not from the influence of courtiers.  One of the hospital buildings of Greenwich, then called the ‘House of Delights,’ was the residence of Henrietta Maria, and the young prince probably played on the little hill now the site of the observatory.

“But Charles, though he started an observatory, did not know very well what was needed.  The first building consisted of a large, octagonal room, with windows all around; it was considered sufficiently firm without any foundation, and sufficiently open to the heavens with no opening higher than windows.  This room is now used as a place of deposit for instruments, and busts and portraits of eminent men, and also as the dancing-hall for the director’s family.

“Under Mr. Airy’s [Footnote:  The late Sir George Airy.] direction, the walls of the observing-room have become pages of its history.  The transit instruments used by Halley, Bradley, and Pond hang side by side; the zenith sector with which Bradley discovered the ’aberration of light,’ now moving rustily on its arc, is the ornament of another room; while the shelves of the computing-room are filled with volumes of unpublished observations of Flamstead and others.