ames Embankment. The lights of Parliament House gleam from a hundred
windows, and in the dark shadows by the banks thousands of coloured
discs of light twinkle and dance and glow like fairy lamps, and are
reflected in the silver surface of the river. That river, as full of
mystery and contrast in its course as London itself--where is such
another? It has ever been a river of pageants, a river of sighs; a river
into whose placid depths kings and queens, princes and cardinals, have
whispered state secrets, and poets have breathed immortal lines; a
stream of pleasure, bearing daily on its bosom such a freight of youth
and mirth and colour and music as no other river in the world can boast.

Sometimes we sally forth in search of adventures in the thick of a
'London particular,' Mr. Guppy's phrase for a fog. When you are once
ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through
a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and
where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear;
where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head,
and the air is full of a kind of luminous yellow smoke.

A Lipton's Tea 'bus is the only one we can see plainly in this sort
of weather, and so we always take it. I do not wish, however, to be
followed literally in these modest suggestions for omnibus rides,
because I am well aware that they are not sufficiently specific for the
ordinary tourist who wishes to see London systematically and without any
loss of time. If you care to go to any particular place, or reach that
place by any particular time, you must not, of course, look at the most
conspicuous signs on the tops and ends of the chariots as we do; you
must stand quietly at one of the regular points of departure and try to
decipher, in a narrow horizontal space along the side, certain little
words that show the route and destination of the vehicle. They say
that it can be done, and I do not feel like denying it on my own
responsibility. Old Londoners assert that they are not blinded or
confused by Pears' Soap in letters two feet high, scarlet on a gold
ground, but can see below in fine print, and with the naked eye,
such legends as Tottenham Court Road, Westbourne Grove, St. Pancras,
Paddington, or Victoria. It is certainly reasonable that the omnibuses
should be decorated to suit the inhabitants of the place rather than
foreigners, and it is perhaps better to carry a