surrender that I just named as my fond practice. I seem to see to-day
that the London of the 'fifties was even to the weak perception of
childhood a much less generalised, a much more eccentrically and
variously characterised place, than the present great accommodated and
accommodating city; it had fewer resources but it had many more
features, scarce one of which failed to help the whole to bristle with
what a little gaping American could take for an intensity of difference
from _his_ supposed order. It was extraordinarily the picture and the
scene of Dickens, now so changed and superseded; it offered to my
presumptuous vision still more the reflection of Thackeray--and where is
the _detail_ of the reflection of Thackeray now?--so that as I trod the
vast length of Baker Street, the Thackerayan vista of other days, I
throbbed with the pride of a vastly enlarged acquaintance.

I dare say our perambulations of Baker Street in our little "top" hats
and other neatnesses must have been what W. J. meant by our poverty of
life--whereas it was probably one of the very things most expressive to
myself of the charm and the colour of history and (from the point of
view of the picturesque) of society. We were often in Baker Street by
reason of those stretched-out walks, at the remembered frequency and
long-drawn push of which I am to-day amazed; recalling at the same time,
however, that save for Robert Thompson's pitching ball with us in the
garden they took for us the place of all other agilities. I can't but
feel them to have been marked in their way by a rare curiosity and
energy. Good Mr. Thompson had followed us in our move, occupying
quarters, not far off, above a baker's shop on a Terrace--a group of
objects still untouched by time--where we occasionally by way of change
attended for our lessons and where not the least of our inspirations was
the confidence, again and again justified, that our mid-morning "break"
would determine the appearance of a self-conscious stale cake, straight
from below, received by us all each time as if it had been a sudden
happy thought, and ushered in by a little girl who might have been a
Dickens foundling or "orfling." Our being reduced to mumble cake in a
suburban lodging by way of reaction from the strain of study would have
been perhaps a pathetic picture, but we had field-days too, when we
accompanied our excellent friend to the Tower, the Thames Tunnel, St.
Paul's and the Abbey, to say not