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 ho 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 the municipal celebration last
summer.

No description of London would be complete without a reference,
however brief, to the singular salubrity and charm of the London