Godmother laughed at her face of amazement when she found herself finishing the sentence in the white parlour at Westminster.
“There are advantages and disadvantages about every age,” she said. “I don’t think you’d care at all for the way most little girls of the eighteenth century were brought up. You wouldn’t have the freedom you enjoy now, I can assure you!”
Betty sighed again, but this time because she remembered with a pang that this was her last visit for a long time to the little house from which she had taken so many magic journeys. Godmother was going abroad again, and for many months her house would be closed. Before she could speak, however, the old lady went on: “Now mind you go soon to the London Museum to refresh your memory about to-day’s glimpse of the eighteenth century in this wonderful city of ours. Go into the Costume rooms, and look at the dresses. You will find there the very velvet coat we saw dear old Oliver Goldsmith wearing at Ranelagh. You will see the sedan chairs in which the fine ladies were carried, and a thousand other things belonging to eighteenth-century London which you must find for yourself.”
“I can go on Monday,” Betty said, “because holidays are beginning.”
“Do. And on your way home, try to imagine how all the changes in the streets since the eighteenth century would strike Dr. Johnson, for instance.
“You will go back by Tube, which is to you a familiar way of getting about. But think of Dr. Johnson’s face if he could suddenly walk into a lift and be lowered into the depths of the earth, and then shot through a narrow tunnel from the Bank to Marble Arch, or farther!”
Betty laughed. “And he wouldn’t recognize Marble Arch when he got there, would he?”
“Not a bit. He would expect to see a more or less country road where Oxford Street now runs, and close to the place where the Marble Arch stands to-day he would look for the gallows called Tyburn Tree, where in his time people were hanged. Think how amazed he would be to behold motor vehicles instead of coaches and sedan chairs in the streets.”
“Or to see trains, and telephones, and electric lights, and telegrams and aeroplanes,” put in Betty. “They would all be strange to him. After all, aeroplanes are still a little strange to us!” she added.
“You’ll pass several Post Offices on your way to Chelsea,” Godmother went on, “and to you, to drop a letter this afternoon through a slit outside the office, and expect it to reach Newcastle or Exeter to-morrow morning seems quite natural. To Dr. Johnson it would appear marvellous, for in his day, letters had to be carried by men on horseback from one town to another. These are only a few examples of the changes which have taken place since the eighteenth century, which in some ways seems so near us and in other respects so far away.” ...