smoke and damp, and, if the paint cannot be renewed so often, it is of
perhaps a little more durable beauty. For a month of preparation, while
the house-fronts in the fashionable streets are escaladed by painters
emulous of the perils of the samphire-gatherer's dreadful trade, the air
is filled with the clean, turpentiny odor, and the eye is pleased with
the soft colors in which the grimy walls remember the hopes of another
spring, of another London season.

If the American's business or pleasure takes him out of town on the edge
of the season and brings him back well over its border, he will have an
agreeable effect from his temporary absence. He will find the throngs he
left visibly greater and notably smarter. Fashion will have got in its
work, and the streets, the pavements, the parks will have responded with
a splendor, a gayety earlier unknown. The passing vehicles will be more
those of pleasure and not so much those of business; the passing feet
will be oftener those going to luncheon and afternoon tea, and not so
solely those hurrying to or lagging from the toils of the day. Even the
morning trains that bring the customary surburbans seem to arrive with
multitudes fresher and brighter than those which arrived before the
season began. I do not know whether it was in tribute to the joyful time
that a housemaid, whom I one morning noted scrubbing down and whitening
up the front steps of a stately mansion, wore a long, black train and a
bolero hat and jacket, and I do not say that this is the usual dress of
the London housemaid, poor thing, in the London season, when putting on
them the scrupulous effect of cleanliness which all the London steps
wear in the morning. One might as well pretend that the may is
consciously white and red on all the hawthorns of the parks and squares
in honor of the season. The English call this lovely blossom so with no
apparent literary association, but the American must always feel as if
he were quoting the name from an old ballad. It gives the mighty town a