lad I
must have been. Anyhow, I had a great day of it, planning what I would
do, half making-believe--just like a kid--that I didn't know where I
might find myself, or what might happen to me. And I was enormously
pleased to think it was all my secret, that nobody else knew anything
about it, and that, whatever I might see, I would keep to myself. I had
always felt like that about the books. Of course, I loved reading them,
but it seemed to me that, if I had been a discoverer, I would have kept
my discoveries a secret. If I had been Columbus, and, if it could
possibly have been managed, I would have found America all by myself,
and never have said a word about it to anybody. Fancy! how beautiful it
would be to be walking about in one's own town, and talking to people,
and all the while to have the thought that one knew of a great world
beyond the seas, that nobody else dreamed of. I should have loved that!

'And that is exactly what I felt about the tour I was going to make. I
made up my mind that nobody should know; and so, from that day to this,
nobody has heard a word of it.'

'But you are going to tell me?'

'You are different. But I don't think even you will hear everything; not
because I won't, but because I can't tell many of the things I saw.'

'Things you saw? Then you really did see wonderful, strange things in
London?'

'Well, I did and I didn't. Everything, or pretty nearly everything, that
I saw is standing still, and hundreds of thousands of people have looked
at the same sights--there were many places that the fellows in the
office knew quite well, I found out afterwards. And then I read a book
called "London and its Surroundings." But (I don't know how it is)
neither the men at the office nor the writers of the book seem to have
seen the things that I did. That's why I stopped reading the book; it
seemed to take the life, the real heart, out of everything, making it as
dry and stupid as the stuffed birds in a museum.

'I thought about what I was going to do all that day, and went to bed
early, so as to be fresh. I knew wonderfully little about London,
really; though, except for an odd week now and then, I had spent all my
life in town. Of course I knew the main streets--the Strand, Regent
Street, Oxford Street, and so on--and I knew the way to the school I
used to go to when I was a boy, and the way into the City. But I had
just kept to a few tracks, as they say the sheep do on the mountains;
and