c syllabic script. Every time I have read about that manuscript
and have happened to be in Orillia (Ontario) or Schenectady (N.Y.) or
any such place, I have felt that I would be willing to take a whole trip
to England to have five minutes at the British Museum, just five, to
look at that papyrus. Yet as soon as I got to London this changed. The
railway stations of London have been so arranged that to get to any
train for the north or west, the traveller must pass the British Museum.
The first time I went by it in a taxi, I felt quite a thrill. "Inside
those walls," I thought to myself, "is the manuscript of Thotmes II."
The next time I actually stopped the taxi. "Is that the British Museum?"
I asked the driver, "I think it is something of the sort, sir," he
said. I hesitated. "Drive me," I said, "to where I can buy safety razor
blades."

After that I was able to drive past the Museum with the quiet assurance
of a Londoner, and to take part in dinner table discussions as to
whether the British Museum or the Louvre contains the greater treasures.
It is quite easy any way. All you have to do is to remember that The
Winged Victory of Samothrace is in the Louvre and the papyrus of Thotmes
II (or some such document) is in the Museum.

The Abbey, I admit, is indeed majestic. I did not intend to miss going
into it. But I felt, as so many tourists have, that I wanted to enter
it in the proper frame of mind. I never got into the frame of mind; at
least not when near the Abbey itself. I have been in exactly that frame
of mind when on State Street, Chicago, or on King Street, Toronto, or
anywhere three thousand miles away from the Abbey. But by bad luck I
never struck both the frame of mind and the Abbey at the same time.

But the Londoners, after all, in not seeing their own wonders, are only
like the rest of the world. The people who live in Buffalo never go
to see Niagara Falls; people in Cleveland don't know which is Mr.
Rockefeller's house, and people live and even die in New York without
going up to the top of the Woolworth Building. And anyway the past
is remote and the present is near. I know a cab driver in the city of
Quebec whose business in life it is to drive people up to see the Plains
of Abraham, but unless they bother him to do it, he doesn't show them
the spot where Wolfe fell: what he does point out with real zest is the
place where the Mayor and the City Council sat on the wooden platform
that they put up for t