for which Mr. Hill, of Bond Street,
gave L 1000, etc., etc.

REFRESHMENTS.

Tickets for Tea, Coffee, Sandwiches, Iced Drinks, or Ices, Sixpence
each, etc., etc.

I hope my American reader is pleased and interested by this glimpse of
the way in which they do these things in London.

There is something very pleasant about all this, but what specially
strikes me is a curious flavor of city provincialism. There are
little centres in the heart of great cities, just as there are small
fresh-water ponds in great islands with the salt sea roaring all round
them, and bays and creeks penetrating them as briny as the ocean itself.
Irving has given a charming picture of such a quasi-provincial centre
in one of his papers in the Sketch-Book,--the one with the title
"Little Britain." London is a nation of itself, and contains provinces,
districts, foreign communities, villages, parishes,--innumerable lesser
centres, with their own distinguishing characteristics, habits,
pursuit, languages, social laws, as much isolated from each other as if
"mountains interposed" made the separation between them. One of these
lesser centres is that over which my friend Mr. Haweis presides as
spiritual director. Chelsea has been made famous as the home of many
authors and artists,--above all, as the residence of Carlyle during the
greater part of his life. Its population, like that of most respectable
suburbs, must belong mainly to the kind of citizens which resembles in
many ways the better class,--as we sometimes dare to call it,--of one of
our thriving New England towns. How many John Gilpins there must be in
this population,--citizens of "famous London town," but living with
the simplicity of the inhabitants of our inland villages! In the mighty
metropolis where the wealth of the world displays itself they practise
their snug economies, enjoy their simple pleasures, and look upon
ice-cream as a luxury, just as if they were living on the banks of the
Connecticut or the Housatonic, in regions where the summer locusts
of the great cities have not yet settled on the verdure of the native
inhabitants. It is delightful to realize the fact that while the West
End of London is flaunting its splendors and the East End in struggling
with its miseries, these great middle-class communities are living as
comfortable, unpretending lives as if they were in one of our thriving
townships in the huckleberry-districts. Human beings are wonderfully
alike wh