out of the window for a
look at it. They stopped for breakfast at an inn far down the pike and
went on through Sittingborn, Faversham, Rochester and the lovely valley
of the River Medway of which Jack had read.

At every stop it amused him to hear the words "Chaise an' pair," flying
from host to waiter and waiter to hostler and back in the wink of an
eye.

Jack spent the night at The Rose in Dartford and went on next morning
over Gadshill and Shootershill and Blackheath. Then the Thames and
Greenwich and Deptfort from which he could see the crowds and domes and
towers of the big city. A little past two o'clock he rode over London
bridge and was set down at The Spread Eagle where he paid a shilling a
mile for his passage and ate his dinner.

Such, those days, was the crossing and the trip up to London, as Jack
describes it in his letters.

CHAPTER V

JACK SEES LONDON AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHER

The stir and prodigious reach of London had appalled the young man.
His fancy had built and peopled it, but having found no sufficient
material for its task in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, had scored
a failure. It had built too small and too humbly. He was in no way
prepared for the noise, the size, the magnificence, the beauty of it.
In spite of that, something in his mental inheritance had soon awakened
a sense of recognition and familiarity. He imagined that the sooty
odor and the bells, and the clatter of wheels and horses' feet and the
voices--the air was full of voices--were like the echoes of a remote
past.

The thought thrilled him that somewhere in the great crowd, of which he
was now a part, were the two human beings he had come so far to see.
He put on his best clothes and with the letter which had been carefully
treasured--under his pillow at night and pinned to his pocket lining
through the day--set out in a cab for the lodgings of Doctor Franklin.
Through a maze of streets where people were "thick as the brush in the
forests of Tryon County" he proceeded until after a journey of some
thirty minutes the cab stopped at the home of the famous American on
Bloomsbury Square. Doctor Franklin was in and would see him presently,
so the liveried servant informed the young man after his card had been
taken to the Doctor's office. He was shown into a reception room and
asked to wait, where others were waiting. An hour passed and the day
was growing dusk when all the callers save Jack had been dispos