But she only said, “We’ll stand on the corner of Oxford Street, and wait for a City Atlas,” and somehow I immediately felt quite accustomed to City Atlases,—and intuitively knew it would be a blue one,—but it wasn’t.
Imitating Miss Anna’s air of habitual custom, I swung myself aboard of the moving monster, and laboriously climbed the curving companion-way at the back.
When she remarked casually that we would take a ’bus, I rebelled.
Once in our seats, it was not so bad; though very like riding the whirlwind, without being allowed to direct the storm.
Miss Anna drew my attention to points of interest as we passed them. In her tactful way she humored my idiosyncrasy. She never said, “On your right is the ‘Salutation and Cat,’ where Coleridge and Southey and Lamb used to congregate of a winter evening.” She said, instead, “Haven’t you always thought ‘Salutation and Cat’ the very dearest tavern in all London?”
Nor when we came to the half-timbered houses of Holborn did she say, “Here lived Lamb’s godfather, who was known to and visited by Sheridan.”
She said: “Don’t you like Hawthorne’s way of putting these things? You remember how he tells us that on his first visit to London he went astray in Holborn, through an arched entrance, in a court opening inward, with a great many Sunflowers in full bloom.”
All this pleased me, as did also Bumpus’s great book-shop, which is, I think, in this neighborhood.
Another delightful pastime was observing the signs over the shop doors. As the English are adept in the making of phrases, so are they especially happy in adjusting their callings to their names.