The streets of London were a good deal dingier and dirtier in 1862 than
they are to-day, and they were certainly vastly noisier. The wooden
pavement was unknown, and the roar of traffic in crowded thoroughfares
was positively deafening. The window-boxes filled with the flowers that
are now so common and so pretty a feature of the London summer were rare,
as also were the coloured awnings and outside blinds now almost universal
in the better-class of thoroughfares. Hyde Park was untidy and neglected,
flower-beds being practically unknown. The fine open space at Hyde Park
Corner did not exist, and Piccadilly Circus was a circus really, and one
of very narrow extent. But though far from possessing the magnificence of
which it can now boast, London forty years ago had certain advantages
over the city of to-day. There were no enormous piles of flats shutting
out air and light from the streets, where both are so much needed. Few of
the houses were more than four storeys in height, and the irregular
architecture which then prevailed in Piccadilly--that most delightful of
all the streets of the world--added to its attractiveness. But I must not
be led into a digression upon London, a city so great and wonderful that
a volume might easily be filled with the story of the associations it
holds in my memory.

On the day after my arrival in town I was present at the State Opening of
the Great Exhibition of 1862, the second--and apparently the last--of the
international exhibitions held in London. Its interest was sensibly
diminished by the fact that, in consequence of the death of the Prince
Consort, neither the Queen nor any member of her family was present. The
Duke of Cambridge, then in the prime of his manhood, took the leading
part in the ceremony, and he had as his supporters Prince Frederick of
Prussia, afterwards the Emperor Frederick, and the Prince of Hesse. We
were not so clever in those days at arranging spectacles as we have since