English travel and English objects of interest, and wherever I went in
London there were Englishmen elbowing me from the front rank, not
rudely, not unkindly, but insensibly to my rights of priority as an
alien. In the old days of my Italian travels I had been used as a
foreigner to carrying it with a high hand at shrines of the beautiful or
memorable. I do not know how it is now, but in those days there was
nothing in the presence of an Italian church, gallery, palace, piazza,
or ruin that you expected less than an Italian. As for Rome, there was
no such thing as doing as the Romans do in such places, because there
were apparently no Romans to set you the example. But there are plenty
of Londoners in London, and of a curiosity about London far greater than
you can ever inspire them with for New York.

Even at such a place as the Zoological Gardens, which they must have
been visiting all their lives, there were, at least, a thousand
Englishmen for every cultivated American we could make sure of when we
went there; and as it was a Sunday, when the gardens are closed to the
general public, this overwhelming majority of natives must have come on
orders from Fellows of the Society such as we had supposed would admit
us much more selectly, if not solely. Still, the place was not crowded,
and if it had been, still it would have been delightful on a summer
afternoon, of that hovering softness, half-cloud, half-sun, which the
London sky has the patent of. The hawthorn-trees, white and pink with
their may, were like cloudlets dropped from that sky, as it then was and
would be at sunset; and there was a density of grass underfoot and
foliage overhead in which one's own childhood found itself again, so
that one felt as free for the simple pleasure of consorting with strange
beasts and birds as if one were still ten or eleven years old. But I
cannot hope to rejuvenate my readers in the same degree, and so had
better not insist upon the animals; the herds of elephants, the troops