be to his own city through a good Irish friend of
his at a Boston fire-station.

"Honor bright, don't you have many fires over here?" he demanded of
Mrs. Pitt. "We have 'em all the time at home. It must be stupid here
without 'em!"

"No, we really have very few," Mrs. Pitt responded. "In winter, there
are a number of small outbreaks, but those are very slight. You see,
we burn soft coal, and if the chimney is not swept out quite
regularly, the soot which gathers there is apt to get afire. When a
chimney does have a blaze, the owner has to pay a fine of one pound,
or five dollars, to make him remember his chimney. In olden times,
perhaps two hundred and fifty years ago, there used to be a tax
levied on every chimney in a house. There's a curious old epitaph in
a church-yard at Folkestone, which bears upon this subject. It reads
something like this:

'A house she hath, 'tis made in such good fashion,
That tenant n'ere shall pay for reparation,
Nor will her landlord ever raise her rent,
Nor turn her out-of-doors for non-payment,
From chimney-money too, this house is free,
Of such a house who would not tenant be.'"

They all joined in a good laugh over this, but Betty remarked that she
thought it was "more of an advertisement for a house than an epitaph."

Their particular bus had been slowly making its way down Ludgate Hill,
along Fleet Street, into the Strand, through Trafalgar Square and
Piccadilly Circus, into Piccadilly itself, and had now reached Hyde
Park Corner, where our friends climbed down the stairs and swung
themselves off.

Betty was grumbling just a little. "I never can get down those tiny
stairs," she exclaimed, "without almost bumping my head and catching
my umbrella in the stair-rail!"

Mrs. Pitt smiled. "That shows you are not a true Londoner, my dear. We
are never troubled. But, never mind; they don't have buses in
Switzerland."

At this, Betty was instantly herself again. "London wouldn't be London
without the funny, inconvenient buses, I know. And it's dear, every
inch of it,--buses and all!"

Mrs. Pitt pointed out Apsley House, where lived the great Duke of
Wellington. A curious fact about this stately old mansion is that on
fine afternoons, the shadow of a nearby statue of this hero is thrown
full upon the front of his former home.

[Illustration: OLD GENTLEMEN, STOUT LADIES, YOUNG PEOPLE, AND SMALL
CHILDREN, ALL RIDE IN ENGLAND. _Page 287._]

As they we