“All right,” said I, “but be careful you don’t give me any of it green.  Advice is like gooseberries, that’s got to be soft and ripe, or else well cooked and sugared, before they’re fit to take into anybody’s stomach.”

Jone was standing at the window of our sitting-room when I said this, looking out into the street.  As soon as we got to London we took lodgings in a little street running out of the Strand, for we both want to be in the middle of things as long as we are in this conglomerate town, as Jone calls it.  He says, and I think he is about right, that it is made up of half a dozen large cities, ten or twelve towns, at least fifty villages, more than a hundred little settlements, or hamlets, as they call them here, and about a thousand country houses scattered along around the edges; and over and above all these are the inhabitants of a large province, which, there being no province to put them into, are crammed into all the cracks and crevices so as to fill up the town and pack it solid.

When we was in London before, with you and your husband, madam, and we lost my baby in Kensington Gardens, we lived, you know, in a peaceful, quiet street by a square or crescent, where about half the inhabitants were pervaded with the solemnities of the past and the other half bowed down by the dolefulness of the present, and no way of getting anywhere except by descending into a movable tomb, which is what I always think of when we go anywhere in the underground railway.  But here we can walk to lots of things we want to see, and if there was nothing else to keep us lively the fear of being run over would do it, you may be sure.

But, after all, Jone and me didn’t come here to London just to see the town.  We have ideas far ahead of that.  When we was in London before I saw pretty nearly all the sights, for when I’ve got work like that to do I don’t let the grass grow under my feet, and what we want to do on this trip is to see the country part of England and Scotland.  And in order to see English country life just as it is, we both agreed that the best thing to do was to take a little house in the country and live there a while; and I’ll say here that this is the only plan of the whole journey that Jone gets real enthusiastic about, for he is a domestic man, as you well know, and if anything swells his veins with fervent rapture it is the idea of living in some one place continuous, even if it is only for a month.

As we wanted a house in the country we came to London to get it, for London is the place to get everything.  Our landlady advised us, when we told her what we wanted, to try and get a vicarage in some little village, because, she said, there are always lots of vicars who want to go away for a month in the summer, and they can’t do it unless they rent their houses while they are gone.  And in fact, some of them, she said, got so little salary for the whole year, and so much rent for their vicarages while they are gone, that they often can’t afford to stay in places unless they go away.