Stradivarius Violin, 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