Duke come from the Forest of Arden for a buttered muffin."

But it was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other. Hilda was presented
first, while I tried to fire my courage by thinking of the Puritan
Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, and the Boston Tea-Party, and the battle of
Bunker Hill. Then my turn came. I murmured some words which might have
been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked self-respecting sort of
way. Then we talked,--at least the duke and Lady Veratrum talked. Hilda
said a few blameless words, such as befitted an untitled English virgin
in the presence of the nobility; while I maintained the probationary
silence required by Pythagoras of his first year's pupils. My idea was
to observe this first duke without uttering a word, to talk with the
second (if I should ever meet a second), to chat with the third, and to
secure the fourth for Francesca to take home to America with her.

Of course I know that dukes are very dear, but she could afford any
reasonable sum, if she found one whom she fancied; the principal
obstacle in the path is that tiresome American lawyer with whom
she considers herself in love. I have never gone beyond that first
experience, however, for dukes in England are as rare as snakes in
Ireland. I can't think why they allow them to die out so,--the dukes,
not the snakes. If a country is to have an aristocracy, let there be
enough of it, say I, and make it imposing at the top, where it shows
most, especially since, as I understand it, all that Victoria has to do
is to say, 'Let there be dukes,' and there are dukes.

Chapter VIII. Tuppenny travels in London.

If one really wants to know London, one must live there for years and
years.

This sounds like a reasonable and sensible statement, yet the moment it
is made I retract it, as quite misleading and altogether too general.

We have a charming English friend who has not been to the Tower since
he was a small boy, and begs us to conduct him there on the very next
Saturday. Another has not seen Westminster Abbey for fifteen years,
because he attends church at St. Dunstan's-in-the-East. Another says
that he should like to have us 'read up' London in the red-covered
Baedeker, and then show it to him, properly and systematically. Another,
a flower of the nobility, confesses that he never mounted the top of
an omnibus in the evening for the sake of seeing London after dark, but
that he thinks it would be rather jolly, and that he will