that the troops habitually pass through, and may be conveniently gloated
upon from attic-windows or basement areas. Probably much of the natural
supremacy of the male of our species has been lost in all ranks of
society through the unimpressive simplicity of modern dress. If men in
civil life still wore ruffles at their wrists, and gold-lace on their
coats, and feathers in their hats, very likely they could still knock
women about as they used, and be all the more admired. It is a point
worth considering in the final adjustment of their mutual relations.

A pair of lovers who match themselves in my memory with those I
eavesdropped so eagerly on the omnibus-top, was a silent pair I noted
one day in St. Paul's. They were imaginably a bridal pair, who had
apparently lost heart among the hard banalities of the place, where
every monument is more forbidding than another, and had sunk down on a
seat by themselves, and were trying to get back a little courage by
furtively holding each other's hands. It was a touching sight, and of a
human interest larger than any London characteristic. So, in a little
different sort, was the rapture of a couple behind a tree on whom a
friend of mine came suddenly in St. James's Park at the very moment when
the eager he was pressing the coy she to be his. My friend, who had not
the courage of an ever-present literary mission, fled abashed from the
place, and I think he was right; but surely it was no harm to overhear
the affianced of a 'bus-driver talking tender nothings to him all the
way from Knightsbridge to Kensington, bending over from the seat she had
taken next him. The witness was going up to a dentist in that region,
and professed that in his preoccupation with the lovers he forgot the
furies of a raging tooth, and decided not to have it out, after all.