[Illustration: HAMPTON COURT--LOOKING UP THE RIVER.]

Half an hour's run lands us at Hampton Court, with a number of
fellow-passengers to keep us company if we want them, and in fact
whether we want them or not. Those who travel into or out of a city of
four millions must lay their account with being ever in a crowd.
Our consolation is, that in the city the crowd is so constant and so
wholly strange to us as to defeat its effect, and create the feeling
of solitude we have so often been told of; while outside of it, at the
parks and show-places, the amplitude of space, density and variety of
plantations, and multiplicity of carefully designed turns, nooks and
retreats, are such that retirement of a more genuine character is
within easy reach. The crowd, we know, is about us, but it does
not elbow us, and we need hardly see it. The current of humanity,
springing from one or a dozen trains or steamboats, dribbles away,
soon after leaving its parent source, into a multitude of little
divergent channels, like irrigating water, and covers the surface
without interference.

It would be a curious statistical inquiry how many visitors Hampton
Court has lost since the Cartoons were removed in 1865 to the
South Kensington Museum. Actually, of course, the whole number has
increased, is increasing, and is not going to be diminished. The
query is, How many more there would be now were those eminent bits of
pasteboard--slit up for the guidance of piece-work at a Flemish loom,
tossed after the weavers had done with them into a lumber-room, then
after a century's neglect disinterred by the taste of Rubens and
Charles I., brought to England, their poor frayed and faded fragments
glued together and made the chief decoration of a royal palace--still