thing about “Twain and one flesh,” and all that sort of thing, I don’t try to crush that man into the earth—­no.  I feel like saying:  “Let me take you by the hand, sir; let me embrace you; I have not heard that pun for weeks.”  We will deal in palpable puns.  We will call parties named King “Your Majesty,” and we will say to the Smiths that we think we have heard that name before somewhere.  Such is human nature.  We cannot alter this.  It is God that made us so for some good and wise purpose.  Let us not repine.  But though I may seem strange, may seem eccentric, I mean to refrain from punning upon the name of this club, though I could make a very good one if I had time to think about it—­a week.

I cannot express to you what entire enjoyment I find in this first visit to this prodigious metropolis of yours.  Its wonders seem to me to be limitless.  I go about as in a dream—­as in a realm of enchantment—­where many things are rare and beautiful, and all things are strange and marvellous.  Hour after hour I stand—­I stand spellbound, as it were—­and gaze upon the statuary in Leicester Square. [Leicester Square being a horrible chaos, with the relic of an equestrian statue in the centre, the king being headless and limbless, and the horse in little better condition.] I visit the mortuary effigies of noble old Henry VIII., and Judge Jeffreys, and the preserved gorilla, and try to make up my mind which of my ancestors I admire the most.  I go to that matchless Hyde Park and drive all around it, and then I start to enter it at the Marble Arch—–­and—­am induced to “change my mind.” [Cabs are not permitted in Hyde Park—­nothing less aristocratic than a private carriage.] It is a great benefaction—­is Hyde Park.  There, in his hansom cab, the invalid can go—­the poor, sad child of misfortune—­and insert his nose between the railings, and breathe the pure, health—­giving air of the country and of heaven.  And if he is a swell invalid, who isn’t obliged to depend upon parks for his country air, he can drive inside—­if he owns his vehicle.  I drive round and round Hyde Park, and the more I see of the edges of it the more grateful I am that the margin is extensive.

And I have been to the Zoological Gardens.  What a wonderful place that is!  I never have seen such a curious and interesting variety of wild animals in any garden before—­except “Mabilie.”  I never believed before there were so many different kinds of animals in the world as you can find there—­and I don’t believe it yet.  I have been to the British Museum.  I would advise you to drop in there some time when you have nothing to do for—­five minutes—­if you have never been there:  It seems to me the noblest monument that this nation has yet erected to her greatness.  I say to her, our greatness—­as a nation.  True, she has built other monuments, and stately ones, as well; but these she has uplifted in honor of two or three colossal demigods who have stalked across the world’s stage, destroying tyrants and delivering nations, and whose prodigies will still live in the memories of men ages after their monuments shall have crumbled to dust—­I refer to the Wellington and Nelson monuments, and—­the Albert memorial. [Sarcasm.  The Albert memorial is the finest monument in the world, and celebrates the existence of as commonplace a person as good luck ever lifted out of obscurity.]