regret of my life that I didn't see any
one of the three. I fully meant to: but I failed: and I can only hope
that the circumstances of my failure may be helpful to other visitors.

The Tower of London I most certainly intended to inspect. Each day,
after the fashion of every tourist, I wrote for myself a little list of
things to do and I always put the Tower of London on it. No doubt the
reader knows the kind of little list that I mean. It runs:

1. Go to bank.

2. Buy a shirt.

3. National Picture Gallery.

4. Razor blades.

5. Tower of London.

6. Soap.

This itinerary, I regret to say, was never carried out in full. I
was able at times both to go to the bank and buy a shirt in a single
morning: at other times I was able to buy razor blades and almost to
find the National Picture Gallery. Meantime I was urged on all sides by
my London acquaintances not to fail to see the Tower. "There's a grim
fascination about the place," they said; "you mustn't miss it." I am
quite certain that in due course of time I should have made my way to
the Tower but for the fact that I made a fatal discovery. I found out
that the London people who urged me to go and see the Tower had never
seen it themselves. It appears they never go near it. One night at a
dinner a man next to me said, "Have you seen the Tower? You really ought
to. There's a grim fascination about it." I looked him in the face.
"Have you seen it yourself?" I asked. "Oh, yes," he answered. "I've seen
it." "When?" I asked. The man hesitated. "When I was just a boy," he
said, "my father took me there." "How long ago is that?" I enquired.
"About forty years ago," he answered;

"I always mean to go again but I don't somehow seem to get the time."

After this I got to understand that when a Londoner says, "Have you seen
the Tower of London?" the answer is, "No, and neither have you."

Take the parallel case of the British Museum. Here is a place that is
a veritable treasure house. A repository of some of the most priceless
historical relics to be found upon the earth. It contains, for instance,
the famous Papyrus Manuscript of Thotmes II of the first Egyptian
dynasty--a thing known to scholars all over the world as the oldest
extant specimen of what can be called writing; indeed one can here see
the actual evolution (I am quoting from a work of reference, or at
least from my recollection of it) from the ideographic cuneiform to the
phoneti