But the picture at which I was gazing as I stood at Cheapside corner was that of the French crossing the Beresina.

And when I, jolted out of my gazing, looked again on the raging street, where a parti-colored coil of men, women, and children, horses, stagecoaches, and with them a funeral, whirled groaning and creaking along, it seemed to me as though all London were such a Beresina Bridge, where every one presses on in mad haste to save his scrap of life; where the daring rider stamps down the poor pedestrian; where every one who falls is lost forever; where the best friends rush, without feeling, over one another’s corpses; and where thousands in the weakness of death, and bleeding, grasp in vain at the planks of the bridge, and are shot down into the icy grave of death.

How much more pleasant and homelike it is in our dear Germany!  With what dreaming comfort, in what Sabbath-like repose, all glides along here!  Calmly the sentinels are changed, uniforms and houses shine in the quiet sunshine, swallows flit over the flagstones, fat Court-counciloresses smile from the windows; while along the echoing streets there is room enough for the dogs to sniff at each other, and for men to stand at ease and chat about the theatre, and bow deeply—­oh, how deeply!—­when some small aristocratic scamp or vice-scamp, with colored ribbons on his shabby coat, or some Court-marshal-low-brow struts along as if in judgment, graciously returning salutations.

I had made up my mind in advance not to be astonished at that immensity of London of which I had heard so much.  But I had as little success as the poor schoolboy who determined beforehand not to feel the whipping which he was to receive.  The facts of the case were that he expected to get the usual blows with the usual stick in the usual way on the back, whereas he received a most unusually severe licking on an unusual place with a cutting switch.  I anticipated great palaces, and saw nothing but mere small houses.  But their very uniformity and their limitless extent impress the soul wonderfully.

These houses of brick, owing to the damp atmosphere and coal smoke, are all of an uniform color, that is to say, of a brown olive-green, and are all of the same style of building, generally two or three windows wide, three stories high, and finished above with small red tiles, which remind one of newly extracted bleeding teeth; while the broad and accurately squared streets which these houses form seem to be bordered by endlessly long barracks.  This has its reason in the fact that every English family, though it consist of only two persons, must still have a house to itself for its own castle, and rich speculators, to meet the demand, build, wholesale, entire streets of these dwellings, which they retail singly.  In the principal streets of the city, where the business of London is most at home, where old-fashioned buildings are mingled with the new, and where the fronts of the houses are