CHAPTER VIII
IN LONDON TOWN
The bells were ringing out the noon hour when the Corners arrived in London, yet it seemed a quiet and dignified place after Paris. Miss Helen had chosen a neat little hotel for their stopping-place to which they drove directly. The party had amused themselves during the journey from Canterbury by choosing what they most wanted to see. Mrs. Corner selected Westminster Abbey, Nan the National Gallery, Jo the British Museum, Mary Lee the Zoo, Jack the Tower, and Jean Kensington Gardens.
"Gracious! but there is a lot to see," Jo remarked as she turned over the leaves of a copy of Baedeker's London. "It would take weeks to do it all, and I suppose the longer you stay the more you find to see; that's the way it generally is."
"It is particularly so with London," Miss Helen acknowledged. "We shall have time only to skim off the cream this trip, but we can see the most important things."
It was Jo, perhaps, who was most impressed by Westminster Abbey. Many of the things and places in Europe were but words to her for she had "scrambled up" as she said, and the time she had passed at Miss Barnes' school had been her only opportunity for real culture, but she was so bright and wide-awake, so eager to absorb information that Miss Helen congratulated herself that she had asked the Western girl to join the party.
"I can't realize it," whispered Jo, after standing a few moments in mute awe before the monuments in the Poet's Corner. "Of course I knew there was a Westminster Abbey, but I hadn't an idea what it was like. Now, I shall never forget. It seems a stupendous thought that all this great number of celebrities should be buried here, and that you have them all in a bunch before you, so to speak. I feel now as if they had really lived and not as if they were names at the end of poems."
The visit to the Abbey took up most of the morning, but as Mrs. Corner was tired, and the twins soon wearied of looking at pictures, it was decided that Miss Helen should take the three elder girls only to the National Gallery while the others returned to the hotel.
Nan would fain have gone at once to the pictures and could scarcely be dragged away to the nearest restaurant for a hasty lunch. Bath buns and crumpets were ordered, the girls saying that these things were so often mentioned in stories of English life, but when Jo asked for lemonade she was told there was none, but she could have a "lemon squash" which proved to be the same thing. "I shall soon catch on to the Englishisms," said Jo, "and you will hear me asking for a grilled bone and skittles and winkles with a lot of other queer things before I leave here."
"I like the National Gallery much better than the Louvre," decided Nan, as, foot-weary, Miss Helen declared they must not try to see more that day.