nst the invasion of all
_improvers_. W----, come here, and assist me to cure Mr Marston of his
skepticism on the absolute impossibility of our ever being surrounded by
London brick and mortar."

A man of a remarkably graceful air bowed to the call, and came towards us.

"W----," said the prince, "comfort me, by saying that no man can be
citizenized in this corner of the world."

"It is certainly highly improbable," was the answer. "And yet, when we
know John Bull's variety of tastes, and heroic contempt of money in
indulging them, such things may be. I lately found one of my country
constituents the inhabitant of a very pretty villa--which he had built,
too, for himself--in Sicily; and of all places, in the Val di Noto, the
most notorious spot in the island, or perhaps on the earth, for all kinds
of desperadoes--the very haunt of Italian smugglers, refugee Catalonians,
expert beyond all living knaves in piracy, and African renegades. Yet
there sat my honest and fat-cheeked friend, with Aetna roaring above him;
declaiming on liberty and property, as comfortably as if he could not be
shot for the tenth of a sixpence, or swept off, chattels and all, at the
nod of an Algerine. No, sir. If the whim takes the Londoner, you will have
him down here without mercy. To the three per cents nothing is
impossible."

"Well, well," said the good-humoured prince, "that cannot happen for
another hundred years; and in the mean time my prospect will never be shut
out. Let them build, or pull down the pyramids, if they will. The tide of
city wealth will never roll through this valley; the noise of city life
will never fill those quiet fields; the smoke of an insurrection of city
hovels will never mingle with the freshness of such an evening as this.
Here, at all events, I have spent half a dozen of the pleasantest years of
my existence, and here, if I should live so long, I might spend the next
fifty, notwithstanding your prophecies, W----, as far from London, except
in the mere matter of miles, as if I had fixed myself in a valley of the
Crimea."

His royal highness was clever, but he was no prophet, more than other men.
Need I say that London found him out within the tenth part of his fifty
years; instead of suffering him to escape, compelled him to build: and,
after the outlay of a quarter of a million, shut him up within his own
walls, like the giant of the Arabian tales in a bottle--His village a huge
suburb of the huge metropolis