fer, and I, my husband, and
the three gentlemen were conducted by the master of the house upstairs
into the turret. If I was delighted before with my prospect, I was now
ravished, for I was elevated above the room I was in before upwards of
thirty feet. I seemed a little dizzy, for the turret being a lantern,
and giving light all ways, for some time I thought myself suspended in
the air; but sitting down, and having eat a mouthful of biscuit and
drank a glass of sack, I soon recovered, and then the gentleman who had
undertaken to convince me that the place I was shown was really London,
thus began, after having drawn aside one of the windows.

"You see, my lady," says the gentleman, "the greatest, the finest, the
richest, and the most populous city in the world, at least in Europe, as
I can assure your ladyship, upon my own knowledge, it deserves the
character I have given it." "But this, sir, will never convince me that
the place you now show me is London, though I have before heard that
London deserves the character you have with so much cordiality bestowed
upon it. And this I can testify, that London, in every particular you
have mentioned, greatly surpasses Paris, which is allowed by all
historians and travellers to be the second city in Europe."

Here the gentleman, pulling out his pocket-glass, desired me to look
through it, which I did; and then he directed me to look full at St.
Paul's, and to make that the centre of my future observation, and
thereupon he promised me conviction.

Whilst I took my observation, I sat in a high chair, made for that
purpose, with a convenience before you to hold the glass. I soon found
the cathedral, and then I could not help saying I have been several
times up to the stone gallery, but not quite so often up to the iron
gallery. Then I brought my eye to the Monument, and was obliged to
confess I knew it to be such. The gentleman then moved the glass and
desired me to look, which doing, I said, "I think I see Whitehall and
St. James's Park, and I see also two great buildings like barns, but I
do not know what they are." "Oh," says the gentleman, "they are the
Parliament House and Westminster Abbey." "They may be so," said I; and
continuing looking, I perceived the very house at Kensington which I had
lived in some time; but of that I took no notice, yet I found my colour
come, to think what a life of gaiety and wickedness I had lived. The
gentleman, perceiving my disorder, said, "