“She’s werry drunk!” he admitted. “But she h’aint noisy. We must give the h’attention of the Force to them w’ot h’is!”
It was but two o’clock when we entered the waiting-room of the station. Out-going trains were infrequent at that time of the day, and we must wait an hour. I found a comfortable sofa in the ladies’ parlor and laid down my throbbing head upon a pillow of the spare shawls without which we never stirred abroad. A kindly-faced woman suspended her knitting and asked what she could do for me.
“Maybe the lady would like a cup of tea with a teaspoonful of brandy in it? Or a glass of h’ale?”
I thanked her, but said I only wanted rest and quiet.
“Which I mean to say, mem, it’s ’ard to get to-day. I’ve been ’ere five year, keeper of this ’ere waiting-room, and never ’ave I seen such crowds. The trains h’are a-comin’ h’in constant still, and will, till h’evening. And h’every train, h’it do bring a thousand. A Temperance pic-nic, you see, mem, do allers draw h’uncommon!”
We saw, not of choice, one more fête-day in England—the Bank holiday lately granted to all classes of working-people. It fell on Monday, August 5th, and caught us in London with a day full of not-to-be-deferred engagements, the departure of some of our family-party being near at hand. The Banks, all public offices and shops were closed. The British Museum, Zoölogical Gardens, The Tower and parks would be crowded, we agreed, in modifying our plans. St. Paul’s and Westminster Abbey seemed safe. We were right with respect to the Cathedral. An unusually large number of people strayed in and sauntered about, looking at monuments and tablets in church and crypt, but we were free to move and examine. It was a “free day” at the Abbey. The chapels locked at other seasons, and only to be seen in the conduct of a verger, were now open to everybody, and everybody was there. We threaded the passage-ways in the wake of a fleet of cockneys, great and small, to whom the tomb that holds the remains of the Tudor sisters, and on which their greatest queen lies in marble state, signified no more than a revolving doll in a hair-dresser’s window; who slouched aimlessly from Ben Jonson’s bust to Chaucer’s monument, and trod with equal apathy the white slab covering “Old Parr,” and the gray flagging lettered, “Charles Dickens.”
That this judgment of the rank and file is not uncharitable we had proof in the demeanor and talk of the visitors.
“James!” cried a wife to her heedless husband, when abreast of the tomb of Henry III. “You don’t look at nothink you parss. Don’t you see this is the tomb of ’Enry Thirteenth?”
“’Enry or ’Arry!” growled her lord without taking his hands from his pocket—“Wot do I care for he?”
None of the comments, we overheard, upon the treasures of this grandest of burial-places amused us more than the talk of a respectable-looking man with his bright-eyed ten-year old son over the memorial to Sir John Franklin. Beneath a fine bust of the hero-explorer is a bas-relief of the Erebus and Terror locked in the ice.