l you these things, I may explain, not because I think you will
be interested, but because I want to fix them in my mind, as we haven't
finished "doing" Bath yet, and are to stop another day or two.

As for Roman talk, there is no end of it among us; it mingles with our
meals, which would otherwise be delicious; and in my dreams, instead of
being lulled by the music of a beautiful weir under my window, I find
myself mumbling: "Yes, Sir Lionel, Ptolemy should have said the place
was outside, not in, the Belgic border." (Sounds like something new in
embroidery, doesn't it?) "Strange, indeed, that they only discovered the
Roman Baths so late as the middle of the eighteenth century! And then,
only think of finding the biggest and best of all, more than a hundred
years later!"

I assure you, I have kept my end up with my two too-well-informed
companions, and I was even able to tell Sir Lionel a legend he didn't
know: about Bladud, a son of the British King Lud Hudibras, creating
Bath by black magic, secreting a miraculous stone in the spring, which
heated the water and cured the sick. Then Bladud grew so conceited about
his own powers that he tried to fly, and if he had succeeded there would
have been no need for the Wright brothers to bother; but when he got as
far as London from Bath the wing-strings broke and he fell, plop! on a
particularly hard temple of Apollo. After him reigned his son, no less a
person than King Lear. I got this out of a queer little old book I
bought the first day we came, but I assumed the air of having known it
since childhood. There's another legend, it seems, about Bladud and a
swine, but it's less esoteric than this, and Sir Lionel likes mine
better.

I do wish we hadn't to spend so much time poking about in the Roman
Baths, for though there are good enough sights to see there, for those
who love that sort of thing, one does get such cold feet, and there are
such a lot of steps up and down, one's dress is soon dusty round the
bottom, and that's a bore when one has no maid.

If I could choose, I'd prefer the Pump Room, and would rather talk of
Beau Nash and the old Assembly Rooms than of Minerva and her temple--or
indeed of Pepys, or Miss Austen and Fanny Burney. By the way, "Evelina"
was hers. I've found that out, without committing myself. I wish I could
buy the book for sixpence. I think I'll try, when nobody is looking; and
it ought to be easy, for we simply haunt a bookshop in Gay Street