Howe's Cheap Tour.--Windsor Castle.--Story of Prince Albert and
his Queen.--Antwerp.

The train, from its sinuous windings among old English landscapes and
thickly populated towns, seemed at last to be gliding into a new world
of vanishing houses and streets. It suddenly stopped under the glass
roof of an immense station, where a regiment of porters in uniform
were awaiting it, and where all outside seemed a world of cabmen.

LONDON!--the world's great city, the nations' bazaar,--where humanity
runs in no fixed channels, but ceaselessly ebbs and flows like the
sea. Cabs, cabs! then a swift rattle through rattling vehicles, going
in every direction, on, on, on! Names of places read in histories and
story-books pass before the eye. The tides of travel everywhere seem
to overflow; all is bewildering, confusing. What a map a man's mind
must be to thread the innumerable streets of London!

The Class stopped at a popular hotel in a fine part of the city,
called the West End. It is pleasanter and more economical to take
furnished lodgings in London, if one is to remain in the city for a
week or more, but as Master Lewis was to allow the boys but a few
days' visit, he took them to a hotel in a quarter where the best
London life could be seen.

The London cabs meet the impatient stranger's wants at once, and the
boys were soon rattling in them about the city, out of the quarter of
stately houses into the gay streets of trade, which seemed to them
indeed like a great world's fair.

[Illustration: WESTMINSTER ABBEY.]

"This is Pall Mall [Pell Mell]," said Frank to Tommy, as their cab
rounded a corner.

"It seems to be all _pell mell_ here," said Tommy. "Had the poet been
to London when he wrote,--

"'Oh, then and there was hurrying to and fro'?

But this street has a more quiet look. What splendid houses!"

"Those," said Frank, "are the houses of the famous London Clubs."

The first visit that the boys made was to that time-honored pile of
magnificence into which kings and queens for centuries have gone to be
crowned and been carried to be buried,--Westminster Abbey.

The party entered at the western entrance, which commands an awesome,
almost oppressive, view of the interior. In the softened light of the
stained windows rose a forest of columns, rich with art and grandly
gloomy with the associations of antiquity. Far, far away it stretched
to the chapel of Edward the Confessor, a name that led the mind
t