“If you want to see his monument, look about you.”
Many other noted men are buried here, Bishop Heber, John Howard, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Wellington, Nelson and Sir John Moore, who wuz “buried darkly at dead of night,” as so many bashful schoolboys know to their sorrow, as they rehearse it in a husky voice to the assembled neighbors the last day of school. Oh, how much they wish as they try to moisten their dry tongue and arrange their too visible and various hands, that the night wuz still darker, so dark that nothin’ wuz ever hearn on’t.
Feelin’ the admiration I did for his livin’ and lovin’ pardner, I wuz glad to see the Albert monument. It wuz evenin’ when we see it, and the garden where it stands wuz illuminated. The great elms glowed under a multitude of red lights. The music-stands glowed with stars of the same color, and the fountains riz up in great sprays of color and radiance. It wuz a beautiful seen, but none too grand for the great good man whose name the tall shaft bears.
Albert Hall, which stands in the same grounds, wuz also brilliantly illuminated; its long glass corridors shone as if wrought out of crystal and ruby.
One day we rode from Blackfriars’ bridge past the Mansion House, where the Lord Mayor holds his receptions. And what interested me fur more, we went past the place where the Foreign Bible Society prints more than three million Bibles a year in two hundred different languages and dialects, carrying the knowledge and love of our Lord unto the ends of the earth.
CHAPTER XXXV
Buckingham Palace wuz a sight to see, beautiful and grand, and not fur off is St. James’s Park, one of the most attractive in the city though it wuz once only a marshy field. As I looked on its charming and diversified beauty I thought how little there is in heredity compared to gumption and draining.
Josiah, as I said, wanted to see the Tower of London. It is the most celebrated fortress in England. It is awful old, and good land! if I wuz shet up there I shouldn’t never expect to break out. Some of the walls are fifteen feet thick. The White Tower, they say, wuz begun by William the Conqueror, a man that I told the guide politely, “wuz quite widely known, and I had hearn a sight of him though I had never had the pleasure of his acquaintance.” It wuz completed in one thousand ninety-eight.