BY GASTON V. DRAKE.
XI.—FROM BOB TO JACK.
London, July —, 189-.
Dear Jack,—We're still in London, and I guess if we stay here until we've seen it all we'll never get to Hoboken. Talk about your three-ringed circuses! London beats 'em all for side-shows and go. When you think you've seen all there is to see you come across an entirely new lot of museums, and parks, and hysterical spots to be visited, and I'm just dizzy trying to remember what Pop told me not to forget. What with St. James's Palace and Madame Tussaud's wax-works, the Zoo and the National Gallery, I hardly know what I saw where, except that of course I didn't see any wax-works at the Zoo.
I think altogether the Zoo and the wax-works are the things I've liked best of all about here. The National Gallery is pretty good, but after you've seen about forty-two miles of pictures, some of 'em as big as a farm your eyes get tired and the back of your neck sort of hurts. Still, I went through it because Pop said I ought to, and whenever I have a nightmare nowadays instead of seeing boojums and snarks I see old masters. You never saw an old master did you? Well you needn't be in any hurry to. They aren't the sort of things boys like very much. They're generally cracked so's to look like a go-bang board and keep you guessing about what they're pictures of, but Aunt Sarah who studied art last winter in Yonkers says they're very educating, and I guess she knows. She says she does anyhow and I don't think she'd say a thing that wasn't so. I can't say that I've learned much from 'em except perhaps that the pictures you and I draw in the backs of our spelling books aren't so bad after all.
Pop says he's learned one thing from 'em too. There used to be a fellow named Gainsborough that painted acres of pictures every year, and Pop says his things are fine and prove that theatre hats aren't modern inventions and he's right about it. He's got several pictures in this gallery that would drive me crazy if I had to sit behind 'em at a matinee. There were some pictures there though that I'd give house-room to if they asked me, by Sir Edwin Landseer. Pictures of dogs. I tell you he could paint dogs that bark. It was as much as I could do to keep from whistling to 'em and patting 'em on the head, and one little spaniel was painted so well that it seemed to me I could see his tail wag. Pop says that that was all imagination, but Aunt Sarah said no it was art, and I let 'em argue it out between 'em. Whatever it was though that painted dog's tail wagged and it was worth travelling miles to see.
I was kind of disappointed with St. James's Palace. I expected to see something like a transformation scene at Humpty Dumpty, gold doors, and fountains, and bands playing and all that. You'd think a Palace would be different from a factory anyhow, but it wasn't, very. It didn't look any livelier than a jail would, and as far as the outside of it was concerned I couldn't see that it was any handsomer than the Grand Central Depot in New York, and not half as big. They wouldn't let us inside. I thought perhaps the Queen was asleep and they were afraid I'd whistle, but Pop said she didn't live there any more, and I didn't blame her. I wouldn't either if I could help it. I dare say it's very fine inside, with onyx stairways and solid gold banisters for the children to slide down, but outside I wouldn't give a cent for it. If it wasn't for the soldiers with their big bear-skin hats and robin-red-breast coats on I wouldn't have cared if we never saw it. The soldiers were worth looking at, though most of 'em have such great big bulgy chests you'd take 'em for pouter pigeons.
Right alongside of the Palace is where the Prince of Whales lives and while we were looking at it he came out in a cab. He was another disappointment. He wore a beaver hat just like Pop's, and instead of having a scepter in his hands he carried an umbrella and a cigar; just the sort of man you'd expect to meet on Broadway any day of the year. Somehow it's hard to get used to the idea of a real live Prince wearing a beaver hat and carrying an umbrella, and it almost makes me sorry I came. I suppose if I could really find out how to go to Fairyland and should go there I'd find all the fairies dressed up in pea-jackets and sailor hats like most of the boys we see nowadays, and probably they'd be playing ball or riding bicycles instead of flying about on gossamer wings and swinging on cobwebs.
I spoke to Pop about it, and he said it was because the Prince loved the people that he didn't dress up like Solomon. All the men feel that they've got to dress like the Prince of Whales and if he came out in a bathing suit and a blue plush smoking-cap on his head, every man in England and New York that wanted to be fashionable would do the same thing, and if he dressed as magnificently as he knew how, in a diamond-studded dress-suit and gold trousers, it would ruin everybody to go and do likewise. So he wears clothes that are within the reach of all, which I think is very nice of him, though I wish I could see him on Sunday when he puts on his best. Pop says the way the men imitate him is very funny. He says there was an actor once disguised himself as the Prince who went riding through the Park on a donkey with bells on its hoofs, and next day sixty-three of the most fashionable young men of London appeared the same way, and when they found out that they had been fooled they were so angry that they wouldn't go to that actor's theatre again, but everybody else thought it was such a good joke that they went and the actor made a fortune.
I was going to tell you about the wax-works at Madame Tussaud's and the Zoo in this letter, but Pop says it's time for me to go to bed, because we are going to have a hard day to-morrow. We're going to take a coach and drive out to Hampton Court and back, so I'll have to close here. I wish you'd ask that Chicago boy if he's a grand-nephew of Baron Munchausen. I told Pop about that prairie-yacht and how Billie's seal-skin cap saved him from being scalped, and Pop was very much interested and said he thought he knew now who Billie was, and when I asked him who, he said the grand-nephew of Baron Munchausen, a man who never told the truth unless it was absolutely necessary.
Yours ever,
Bob.
P. S.—I've just got out of bed for a minute to tell you that you never saw such monkies as they have at the Zoo. They look almost as human as some of our Aldermen in New York, Pop says.