“It will be different, certainly. And now, my dear, it’s getting so late that I’m going to drive you straight home.”
V
The Eighteenth Century
THE LONDON OF THE GEORGES AND OF DR. JOHNSON
“To-day we’re going to see London as it was after the Fire!” exclaimed Betty, when she had recovered as usual from her first astonishment and delight at “remembering everything” the moment she saw Godmother. “How are we going to get back this time?”
“Well, there’s a good deal we can see without ‘going back’ at all,” Godmother replied. “Because all that surrounds us every day is London after the Fire. Many buildings exist now, just as they were put up when the city began to rise from its ashes in the latter part of Charles the Second’s reign.”
“Isn’t there to be any ‘magic’ at all to-day, then?” Betty’s voice was full of disappointment.
“Not just yet, at any rate. We are not going back quite so far into the Past this time. Only, in fact, about a hundred and fifty years—to the middle of the eighteenth century.”
“But London must have changed even in that time?”
“It has—enormously. Yet at the same time much remains the same, and I propose to show you first what is left in our own day of the end of the seventeenth and the whole of the eighteenth centuries. It will only be necessary to employ magic in the case of certain places that have altogether vanished from the London of our own time. But before we go any further with or without magic, we must have our usual little history examination. So sit down and collect your thoughts.”
Betty obeyed with a good grace, for she knew she would find all she was about to see, ten times more interesting for not being “in a muddle” about her history.