DEAR JACK,—Pop wants me to keep a dairy of this trip, and I told him I would, but it takes an awful pile of time to do it and write letters home too, so it's come down to this: Either you've got to keep these letters I'm writing to you, and let me have 'em type-written when I get back, or I've got to keep the dairy, and if I keep the dairy you don't get any more letters. I'll keep on writing until you let me know what you're going to do about it, because I guess maybe you'll say all right, go ahead. I don't see much sense in keeping dairys, but Pop says that boys that go abroad ought to, because they see lots and lots of things they never saw before and ought to remember. "What's the matter with remembering them?" said I, and he said: "Oh, you can't. Once there was a man who really remembered all he saw and heard, and when he got to be an old man his memory held so much it bulged his head out, and he had to have his hats built for him at ruinous expence."
Speaking of expence reminds me. The money they have over here is fine. My allowance when I'm home is ten cents a week, and over here Pop gives me sixpence. It's a clear gain of two cents a week, and I'm mighty glad I wasn't getting a quarter a week, because then Pop says he'd have made it a shilling, and I'd have lost a cent every week, because a shilling's only worth twenty-four cents. I hate to spend my allowance here though. I don't wonder English people get awful rich. It's easier to save than it is at home because over here when you spend money you feel as if you were spending your collection of coins, which you don't like to do. I've spent two bully coins already. One of 'em had George the Third's head on it, and the other was a Queen's Jubylee sixpence.
There's other money too, and lots of gold in sight. The five-dollar gold piece and the Queen all go by the same name, the sovereign, though some people call it the pound so as to extinguish it from the Queen. I haven't seen her yet, and I don't know as I want to. They say she wears bonnets just like all other women, and doesn't go round with regal things on at all. I don't see what fun there is in seeing a Queen if she don't carry a wand in her hand and wear a crown on her head.
There's lots of nonsense in the pictures we've seen of these royal personages anyhow. The other day when Pop and I were coming home from the bank in a handsome cab we passed a carriage with the Prince of Whales in it. He's going to be King some day if he has luck and he didn't look any more like a Prince than Sandboys. I've seen Sandboys look a great sight more hortier than he did, and as for the feathers he's always said to wear he didn't have a feather about him. I guess we've got Indians at home that can give him points on feathers and not half try.
But I tell you you can tell Americans every time even if you can't tell a Prince or a Duke from a hotel-keeper. I was sitting in the office the other day looking at the hotel elevator. They have two of 'em in every hotel because one of 'em seems to be out of order, and a lady came up to me and said she guessed from my spockling black eyes I was a little Italian boy, and I said "Nit," and then she knew right away that I was one of those bad American boys without any manners, but I didn't care and I mayn't have good manners, but I don't wear a beaver hat the way her boy did. It's the funniest thing you ever saw how the kids over here go into beavers as soon as they cut their teeth, and sailor collars. I thought I'd die when I saw that lady's son get into the elevator with his beaver and sailor collar on and a little coat that Pop says is called a Eatin' jacket that stops at his waist so's to make it handy to spank him. I found out afterwards though that he was a great sight better than he looked. When his Ma said my manners was bad he sort of looked up in the air and winked at the roof of the elevator and I had it in for him when I met him alone in the hall. I thought he'd be easy but he wasn't. I knocked his hat off but I had to stop there because while he had good manners enough when his mother was around he didn't have any when he was alone in the hall with me and I tell you we had a time of it until Pop came along and pulled us apart. There wasn't much damage done except to his beaver hat and we made it up afterwards and I sort of like him next to you. When he heard that I'd saved up and had almost three shillings he told me about a fine place near the hotel where they had tarts for sale and my what a gorge we did have on buns.
Since I wrote you about the town we've seen quite a lot of things but I've been kind of disappointed in 'em. We went to the British Museum the other day and I expected to see walruses and British Lions and John Bulls and unicorns and things like that but they didn't have anything worth looking at except mummies. There was some Elgin marbles Pop was anxious to see and I wanted to see 'em too because I'm fond of marbles but when we came to them they weren't our kind of marbles at all, only statchuary and great big slabs of figures with broken noses and things like that. There wasn't a thing in the whole place to compare with the circus museums we have at home except the mummies and they were fine, though there wasn't a live one in the place. We saw the mummy of Cleopatra who used to be the Queen of Egypt about a million years ago, and I must say if she looked like that I'm glad I wasn't alive then. Bogie men aren't in it with people like Cleopatra. She was a fearful looking lady but it was fun looking at her mummy and thinking how she'd been a Queen once and now wasn't anything but a side show to a museum. It sort of makes you satisfied to be a plain American with nothing ahead of you but being President when you think how the Kings and Queens of those times weren't allowed to keep quiet in their sarcophaguses, as they call the boxes mummies are buried in, but have to be trotted out to amuse people. Pop says it's an outrage to disturb a lady like that and I agree with him. I'd hate like anything to be hauled out for a museum a thousand years from now and have people look at me and say O my. That Bob Drake! I thought he was a better looking boy than that. But after all it's the only kind of circus these English boys have and I suppose it's better than none. Pop says they don't know what a three ringed circus is over here and I'm sorry for them, though I must say the circuses home in New York every year are making me cross-eyed trying to see all that is going on at once.
To-morrow we're going out to the Zoo, and next time I write to you I hope to tell you all about it. Somehow or other I expect great things from the Zoo, but I'm afraid that after we get there we'll find that it isn't a bit like the Zoos we are used to. It'll probably be made up of a lot of books and old pictures instead of interesting things like monkeys.