Friday: Tina & I left Susan's apartment at about 10:00 and took the tube to Leicester (which rhymes with jester) Square. We spent all day in the National Gallery, to our great pleasure. I would rank this gallery with the Metropolitan, or the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or the National Gallery at the Smithsonian. We saw a lot of great paintings, including Dona Isabel by Goya, which I liked a lot, and one by Joshua Reynolds of Tarleton, the British general during the Revolutionary War who was so despised by the people in the Carolinas, and the one of Salisbury Cathedral by Constable which Tina likes so much...

Saturday: We set out for Hampstead Heath, with Susan at the wheel, I beside her with the book of maps, Madeleine esconsed in her throne in the back seat, and Tina (by Madeleine's special request) seated by M--.
Finding one's way from A to B: When [street signs] do appear, they are not on a corner post, but on the side of some nearby building. The name may be on the face of the building you are approaching, or behind you. It may be ten feet above the ground, or at ground level. Next, the name of each street changes, frequently. For example, we are a block or so away from a street named Kensington High Street. This street runs all the way across the map I'm looking at. On this map, reading from West to East, this street is named London Road, Staines Road, London Road Again, High Street, Kew Bridge Road, Chiswick High Road, King Street, Hammersmith, Kensington High Street, Kensington Road, Knightsbridge, Piccadilly, Shaftesbury Road, and High Holborn. So if you're on some intersecting road, wanting to turn onto Kensington High, you have to know its local name. Next, the street map is not a map at all, but a schematic. You are driving along what the map shows to be a perfectly straight street when suddenly it makes a 60 degree swerve to the left. You instantly realize you are probably on the wrong street (which happens, even to experienced drivers, fairly often), but there's no way to check this out, because there is no street name in sight,anywhere.............Or, you're driving along this supposedly straight street, when suddenly IT FORKS. Again, no street names in sight...........Or, you're driving along Street A, approaching its intersection with Street B, where you must turn left. When you get there, you find that left turns are forbidden. No problem, you blithely think, being a hardbitten veteran now, and you steam forward, looking for a chance to turn left at some future intersection. No such chance ever comes. Ultimately, you make your way back to the intersection in question, cast about, and realize that you should have made your left turn A BLOCK BEFORE REACHING Street B. And, this turn IS NOT MARKED IN ANY WAY.
Hampstead Heath is a tract of about 800 acres, in Northwest London, which has been left pretty much in its natural state. There are some paved trails, and a few scattered park benches, but little else. No pavilions, no trash cans, no picnic tables, no attendants, NO TOILETS, no park attendants, no souvenir shops. The center of it is a large hill, so gradual that you don't realize it's a hill at all, until you suddenly find yourself standing in a large flat broad plain, looking down at London, spread out at your feet, in three directions. Rather windy on the top. A couple of men were flying kites, making them swoop and dance. One kite had something like a bull-roarer attached, and made a great roar as it dove. Kite-flying seems quite a solitary pursuit; each man was fully absorbed in the task, and quite alone. One had no admirers at all, definitely; the other had a possible, a lady sitting on a park bench, a little distance away. No one spoke to them, and they to no one. Didn't Somerset Maugham have a short story, mostly about the course of a marriage, in which the wife very much wanted the husband's company on the weekend, but what he really liked to do on his days off was to go to the park and fly his kite?
We had lunch at a nearby PUBLIC HOUSE, the Freemasons Arms. It is an old pub, well out in the country until maybe a hundred years ago, owing its survival to its proximity to the `Heath, where nobility like Charles II liked to come and play outdoor games. The food was first-rate, and lots of it, but rather pricey ... The menu said they had a skittles alley, and I had always heard of beer and skittles, so after lunch I asked to see the alley, and it turned out that it is one of the only two surviving skittles alleys in England, or maybe they said in London. Anyway, the "alley" is a rectangle cut into the floor, maybe four inches deep, maybe 2.5 feet wide, maybe 20 feet long. At one end of the alley there are ten pins, very large, maybe 2 feet high, arranged in the usual triangle. At the other end of the alley stands the player. He hurls something rather like a discus at the pins. He is not rolling a ball, he is hurling a discus. The discus is made of wood, or lignum vitae, about the diameter of a large dinner plate, very thick in the middle. It is called a "cheese." The object is to knock down all of the pins in as few throws as possible.
Footnote: There are at least 3 ways to play skittles. One of them is called the London game and it is the one which has nearly died out, with only two alleys left in London. Elsewhere the game may still be very much alive; I don't know.
As we left the pub, we walked down a street with metered parking. In about the middle of the block, a large pole has a box hung on it, and the box says "Pay and Display." You feed your money into this box, and it prints out a receipt which says how much money you paid and how much time this gives you. You then stick this receipt onto the inside of your windshield. Out of curiosity I read one of the receipts and it said that the guy had paid 3 ($4.74 at today's rate), that the receipt was being printed at l2:20 p.m. on October l9, and that the bearer was entitled to park until l5:20 p.m. on that day. The rate is evidently l per hour, or at least on that street. You might think that one would prefer to risk a parking ticket, but Susan says the parking fines are so horrible that one would almost rather go to prison. The place is fearfully congested. There are also unmetered spaces, and Susan has a parking license which cost her 70 pounds per year, and entitles her to park in her home borough in any unmetered space, without paying. (If she parks in a metered space, she has to pay just like anyone else). To park in an unmetered space, though, you must first find one; and there are so many cars that the parking license is really just a hunting license. Note also that the license is good only in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, and expires in one year, and costs $ll2.

Sunday: [High Church/Church of England service, a walk on Kensington High, Marks & Spencer] Tina & I went to see a nearby Victorian home, belonging to a famous cartoonist for Punch. His name was Linley Sambourne, his son's name was Mawdley Herapath Sambourne, and his daughter was named Maud. What has happened to all these wonderful names? His wife was also quite an artist, and the two of them spent a lot of time and money buying objects of art and beauty, or of curiosity, for their home. At their death it went to their son, who inherited substantial wealth and left the house intact. He was quite a man-about-town and lived mostly at his club,and when he lived at home he lived mostly in one room, so the place remained pretty much unchanged. Incidentally there were four full-time servants - a cook, a parlour maid, an upstairs maid, and a coachman. At the son's death it went to a granddaughter who had spent many happy days there as a child and wanted everything just as she remembered it, and was rich enough to do just as she pleased. She lived there about 20 years, and then turned it over to the group which now preserves it.

Monday: Today we went to Hampton Palace and had a splendid time. The palace is located about 6 miles Southwest of, and across the Thames from, the square mile which contained the City of London in l520. It was built in the l520's & '30s by Cardinal Wolsey, but it was so imposing and beautiful and altogether admirable and better than anything the king had that King Henry VIII immediately took it over for himself. One should never out-do the king, at least within his field of view. At the palace, there are at least l2 tours to choose from. Some have costumed guides, and some have tapes. We began with a 25-minute narration of the personalities and fate of each of Henry VIII's six wives. It was so interesting that each wife has become an individual in her own right, in my mind, and I believe that I remember a fair amount of what was said about each. The mnenomic is divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived. The narrators were first-rate; one can hardly imagine much improvement.
We followed this with a guided tour of Henry VIII's State Apartments (the rooms in which he held court and conducted the business of the kingdom), followed by an l8-minute lunch, followed by a guided tour of the King's Apartments of William III (the William of William and Mary), followed by wandering about a bit, and then a half hour in the gift shop. I shan't attempt to recount any of what we saw and heard, but it was a fine day and we all enjoyed it greatly.

Tuesday:We set out for Bath about l0:00, but decided to go by Stonehenge. Bath is roughly l00 or l05 miles West of here, and to go by Stonehenge we had to first go Southwest and then North-Northwest, making the trip about l30 miles. It was an easy drive, even with Madeleine with us, in Susan's (or rather Polygram's) sporty BMW. Before getting out of town we topped up the BMW's tank, to the tune of about $44. Gas here costs 60 pence per LITRE. A litre is a little less than a quart - I don't know the exact figure, but we'll say 90%. that makes it 66 pence per quart, i.e., $l.56 per quart, i.e., $6.24 per gallon.
Stonehenge was certainly impressive. It sits out in a great plain, with trees well off on the horizon but none anywhere close. The plain is covered with grass, very green, very dense, with no bare spots, like a great lawn. There are lots and lots of sheep grazing on it (Madeleine greeted the sheep - "Hello, sheep"), but I saw no shepherds. A highway has been built near it, about 200 yards away. On the opposite side of the highway there is a car park, with a SMALL concession stand and gift shop and set of toilets. You get to the henge via a tunnel under the highway. And that's it - no other structures on the plain at all, anywhere within view.
Everyone already knows a lot about Stonehenge so I'll only mention a few things. The inner ring of stones are "bluestones," so called because even though they are about the color of granite, if one breaks them open they are for a few years a brilliant blue. They were brought from some mountains in Wales, about 240 miles away. They are, in all kinds of weather, two or three degrees warmer than the other stones, and no one seems to know why. The other stones are sarsen, a kind of sandstone (the bluestones are dolomite), and are much bigger than the bluestones. The sarsen stones were brought from the Marlborough Downs, about 20 miles away.
Does everyone already know that the word "Gilgal" in the Bible means "circle of stones," and that several Gilgals are mentioned in the Old Testament? The first Gilgal mentioned is the one encountered by the Israelites just after they crossed the river Jordan in their invasion of Caanan, about 1200 B. C. The first stones at Stonehenge were placed there about 2,600 B. C., they say. The wind blows all the time, at Stonehenge. If you go there take one extra garment to wear while you go to the stones, because the wind chill factor must be about l0 degrees. Speaking of weather, either the badness has been exaggerated or we hit it very lucky - it has hardly rained at all, only a little bit on the first two days; and the temperature has been mostly around 55 or so, ranging from maybe 40 to maybe 60. Susan said to bring layered clothes, so I brought three sweaters and a London Fog raincoat with a lining, which I bought from Marcus Goldstein for $75 in l962 or maybe 1963, and which somebody (Catherine?) took off somewhere ( Boston?) for a few years, but which I now have back and which is still in first-class shape, now that Tina has sewed up a rip in the back. Except that we didn't bring the London Fog; it and a brand-new and quite attractive raincoat which Tina bought from L. L. Bean are still hanging near the back door, right where we put them so we'd be sure not to forget them. I was wearing two sweaters most of the time, at first, but for the last few days I've been wearing only one, and quite comfortable. On the Salisbury Plain you need two, and three wouldn't hurt.
Wands: Or hand-held audio receivers. Or whatever. These things are everywhere and they are great. At Stonehenge they give you one, free (but you have to pay to get in, but we didn't mind because all the money goes to the National Trust, which has bought up all of the surrounding plain so no one can come and put apartments on it, or whatever. The monument itself is owned by a different outfit.) You take the wand with you, and as you walk around the great circle of stones you come to numbered stations. At station 11, we'll say, you press the numbered buttons for 11 and the wand tells you something about what you're looking at. Then the wand tells you to punch 12 if you want to know a little more about the geology of the place, or 13 if you want the ancient legends about its construction, or 14 if the method of transporting the stones, and so on. If you're not interested you don't have to punch in the numbers. You can play the pieces over and over, in any order, & fast-forward or rewind as much as you please. At the Roman Baths in Bath the wands were much the same, also in the Costume Display at Bath. At the National Gallery there are more than 2,000 pictures, all numbered, and if you want to know about some particular picture you just press its number and hit "Play" and it tells you all about it, for 60 or 90 seconds. Tina has asked me to put in that the buttered scones at the Stonehenge concession stand are delicious.

Wednesday: After breakfast we set out for Bath. ... Parking turned out to be a public park that charges 80 pence per hour for the first 4 hours, and then jumps to l5 pounds if you go even one minute over 4 hours. We got there at 10:45, took careful note of the time, and began by walking down to the Roman Baths. Rainwater which fell to the earth about 10,000 years ago gradually penetrates down to a depth of about 3 miles, and is then heated to live steam by the magma, and then percolates upward, looking for an escape route, and finds one at what is now Bath.
The hot springs here are ancient. When the Romans came here, in 43 A. D., they found the hot springs spilling into a vast marsh, which gradually drained into the river Avon, about 5 miles away. Here they found a company of Druid priests, worshipping a Celtic god or goddess called Sul. Sul's attributes sounded very much like the Roman goddess Minerva to them, so they decided that Sul was a manifestation of Minerva, and decided to build a temple to Sulis Minerva at the spot. Within 50 years the Romans had drained the swamps, enclosed the springs, built drains which led from the springs to the Avon, with smaller drains leading part of the water off to what are now the various baths and then back to rejoin the main drain. Those same drains are still right there, still working. The largest bath is about 60 feet wide and l30 feet long, and it was lined with lead sheets to keep the bath water from leaking out and also to keep the hot upwelling water from leaking in. The lead sheets are about 3 inches thick, and were soldered together. After more than 1900 years all of the solder joints are still in place and the bath is still watertight.
There is actually a great complex of baths. The water flows up at a constant rate of 250,000 gallons per day, at a constant temperature of 117 degrees F. Cold water was mixed in, in different proportions, to feed baths of different temperatures. Many of the baths were widely believed to have healing powers. The water has 43 minerals and 7 trace elements, and may indeed have some sort of effect. The rich and powerful have been coming there since at least 93 A. D. to take the waters - to drink them, sometimes, a gallon a day, all before breakfast, as prescribed by some physicians - but mostly to sit in one or more of the various baths. One bath had an arrangement which made the waters churn around, something like a Jaccuzzi. Bath has been very popular over all the centuries ever since, as a place of healing, and as a gathering-place for the rich and the powerful. Onward, to the abbey which stands within a stone's throw. Again, very ancient. The present building was begun in l499 under Henry VII. The work was abandoned when Henry VIII seized all the monasteries and pensioned off the monks, but Elizabeth found the building so beautiful that she had it completed. Also, she needed to end the strife between the Church of England and the Catholics, which had the country in almost a state of unending civil war. The old abbey is indeed beautiful. It has the most elaborate stained glass windows I've ever seen. For example, the great window on the South wall is divided into 56 segments. Each segment has an incident from the life of Christ. The are many such stained glass windows.
There are also several large clear windows, which admit light, so that the interior is much better illuminated than in most medieval structures. The walls of the building are naked stone, and chiseled into the stone are monuments, or in effect gravestones, many very ancient, some quite touching. Some were of famous men, and recited important events in their careers. Others were of wives or husband or children, with grief evident in every word. There was a very sad one for a little adopted girl who had died at the age of about 18 months.
Onward, to the Assembly Rooms. Charles Dickens writes of these, as do many others. As stated, this was a gathering place for high society for many centuries. The Assembly Rooms are (is?) a large building, built to give the aristocracy and the gentry - the rich merchants - a place to gather and meet and divert themselves. The upper floor of the building is divided into three enormous rooms. One of the rooms was a large ballroom. Dickens writes of dancing there. Around the dancing floor there was in effect a set of bleachers. Adjoining the ballroom, in the center of the building, was a large gaming room, where the young bloods gambled at cards or dice or whatever. On the other side of the building was a great tea room. Members of polite society would move from room to room during the evening, chatting with their friends, meeting new ones, displaying themselves and their clothing, etc. This would have been the place to go, to see and be seen, to meet everyone who was anyone. Georgette Heyer sets a lot of her Regency novels here.
In the same building on a lower floor there are displays of scores and scores of costumes from the last 3 centuries. Like Stonehenge, handheld audio tapes are handed out at the entrance. One punches in the appropriate number and gets a minute or so of commentary about the scene one is viewing. Further punching will give even more in-depth data about the same scene. I didn't think this would be my cup of tea, but the fact is that I found it pretty interesting. Certainly the gowns and dresses were beautiful, and the masculine attire impressive. One of the basic purposes seems to have been display. They lectured us about the importance of display at Hampton Court, and I must say that it keeps cropping up. Many of the things we saw at Hampton Court were clearly for this purpose. It is a plausible motive for the construction of Stonehenge. It could well have been the motive for the elaborate costumes we saw in the Assembly Rooms. In some cases, no doubt, the women themselves wished to be imposing; and in many cases, I suspect, the man desired that his woman display his wealth and power.
We were running out of time, and we left the Costume Rooms before any of us wanted to, and hustled back to the car park, to get there before the l5 pound charge kicked in. We did get there in time, by about 3 minutes. Unfortunately we then found that we had miscalculated, somehow, and had been gone for just under 5 hours, not 4. So l5 pounds down the drain. The charge seemed to stop at l5 pounds, and we would have gone back and done another few hours, but Madeleine is not very big on Roman baths and abbeys, or costume halls, so we just went back to a grocery store we had noticed and bought some ready-made sandwiches and what-not in their delicatessan, including bottles of water, and went back to Woollsey Grange and dined in our room.

Thursday after driving back: Tina and I walked up to Kensington High Street and then down to the tube station, where we joined a walking tour of this general area put on by an outfit named London Walks. We walked around the Kensington area for a couple of hours, with our guide stopping at points of interest and telling us the history of the place, sprinkled with anecdotes. Many famous people have lived here. We saw the homes of Jacob Epstein, John Stuart Mill, Winston Churchill, Stephen Spender (Virginia Woolf's father), and many others. We also saw the present home of Anthony Snowden, and the London home of King Hussein when he is here, etc. This doesn't sound like much, as I re-read what I have just typed, but the whole thing depends on the guide. If you have a good guide it can be really good, but if you have a bad one it can be deadly. Ours was first-class, and we had a fun two hours, & learned a lot, such as what is a mews, & that London is really a collection of villages, as I told you above. I think London Walks probably has a jealously-guarded reputation for excellent guides, & we are thinking of doing their tour of Westminster Abbey on Tuesday afternoon. Tina very much wants to see W- Abbey. We went there on our previous trip, but tried to do it without a guide, and probably missed 2/3rds of it. One thing I have learned from that & other trips is, Always Get The Guided Tour. It is a much better bet.

Friday: Susan had things to do, so Tina & I set out alone. Down the tube to the Embankment station, with only one bad decision, which we realized after only one stop. I had this underground system down pat when we were here before; I think I just got careless & went to the right platform but caught the first train that came along without looking to see where it was going. No great harm done, leaving out the chagrin. From the Embankment station it was then only a short walk to the Portrait Gallery.
On the way to the Portrait Gallery we passed by the building which houses the Chelsea underground station. It is a lovely building, with lots of architectural embellishments, and statues out front, and you can see how proud the Victorians were of their underground system, after they got it built. The ground floor and the basement floors are the station, but the first, second, and third floors are offices, and very fine offices they are, at least from the outside. Splendid balconies, and a projecting octagonal tea-room. I hope I can find a postcard of it.
The Portrait Gallery is full of paintings of England's famous [men and women. Beside each painting is a brief summary of the sitter's life, or of whatever made him/her important. The paintings are arranged chronologically, with the oldest (Edward the Confessor, I think) at the top; so by beginning there and working downward you can get a pretty good summary of the history of the country. By reading all the info about all of the people, including many you never heard of before, you can get a pretty good sense of the spirit of the times, the zeitgeist. Beginning in the late l500's there are increasing numbers of non-aristocrats - merchants, scientists, writers, poets, members of the House of Commons, etc. - and there are lots of notable women, including quite a few courtesans. I thought it was a great place, and if I could pick only one place to go back to, it might be this one. Tina & I started at the top floor and worked down, and by the time we were worn out it was 1:30, and we were still on the top floor. (It is a BIG building.) We came down and went to lunch at the National Gallery, next door. We had discovered the Pret A Manger (ready-to-eat) cafeteria when we visited the N. G. on our second day here. The sandwiches are thick & hearty, with good bread. Of course, you still have to buy your water. After lunch we went to the NG gift shop - I have learned to enjoy looking at the postcards, & sometimes other things; and Tina looks at everything. After a brief debate, we went back to the Portrait Gallery for a few more hours, and then to its gift shop, until it closed at 5:55. Then back to the apartment, without incident this time. Susan was just beginning to get worried when we arrived.

Saturday: ...went for a great ramble through part of Kensington ... While doing this, we passed through some beautiful areas. Like Rochester near where you lived, Sarah, only far far more palatial. 300 years ago the City of London was only l square mile, and there were various little villages scattered around the countryside near it. Kensington was one such village, and it was a well-established marketplace for food. When the Great Plagues came, royalty fled the foul air of London, which was even then polluted, and the king and his court came here, because food was readily available. The aristocrats began building their homes here, and their homes were palaces, inferior only to the king's. This place teems with 20- to 40-room homes. Many of them are embassies now. That also why there are so many mews here - have I said what a mews is? It is an row of what were once stables. The horses lived downstairs and the grooms above them. Sometimes the horses lived downstairs and on the next floor, and the grooms on the next floor. They are a cinch to spot. There are always a row of them, not just one isolated stable. The downstairs is usually a garage with a roll-up door, like Susan's place, except sometimes part of the downstairs has been converted into an apartment, again like Susan's place. Actually, here the ground floor is called the ground floor. The floor above it is called the first floor, the next one is the second floor, and so forth. So the horses lived on the ground floor and the first floor, sometimes. Getting back to Kensington, gradually the City burst its bounds, and began growing like an amoeba, absorbing the nearby villages. Kensington, Mayfair, Kews, Knightsbridge, Notting Hill, Marylebone, Bayswater, Cheapside, Chelsea, Westminster, Soho, Piccadilly - these are all former villages. Many of these villages still maintain some of their independence, and have their own mayors and city councils, etc. The mayor of London is the mayor of the old ancient one-mile square, only.
[After another walk, in Holland Park] It was once the park attached to Holland House, but the building is now gone ... London has more parks and open spaces than any other European city, except Stockholm. A good many of these parks were attached to palaces. Kensington Park - one of the finest ones - and Hyde Park were both attached to Kensington Palace, which Tina and I visited during our l988 trip here, where several generations of royalty have lived and where Princess Diana still lives. Both parks were hunting parks, i.e., they were stocked with deer and other game, and the king hunted in them. Including falconry.

Sunday: Now Sunday night. After lunch Tina & I took the tube to Westminster station, and then walked to the Cabinet War Rooms, the underground rooms near Buckingham Palace, beneath the Treasury, from which Churchill and his key personnel directed World War II. They certainly were impressive. I'd say the two big things I learned was how vital the convoys were - without them Germany might well have won - and how important the weather is. Did you know that meteorlogical observations and that sort of basic weather info is next to top secret? Tina would add two more big things we learned: the extraordinary number of casualties sustained by the civilian population - more than 463,000 civilians killed, & more than 4,000,000 injured - and the remarkable fortitude of the British people. After the War Rooms, we walked up Birdcage Walk (a street). On the way, we first went by St. James Park, which is truly beautiful. Tina thinks it the most beautiful park she's ever seen. Immediately after the park, we came to Buckingham Palace. In the courtyard, as we approached, there is a great fountain, with statuary around its rim. The first statue we came to was of a life-size lion, standing, with a woman by his side holding a sickle. It is an excellent lion - the best I've ever seen. He looks strong, fierce, and angry - definitely nobody to mess with. Even made of stone, I hesitated to get too close to him.
We got to the palace, and peered through the gilt-topped gates, but there wasn't much to see. We did see someone moving about in a hall, but couldn't tell what he was doing, and soon he disappeared. The ground was covered by not a lawn, but red gravel. We asked the bobbies where the red gravel comes from, but they didn't know. Looking at the palace from the front, and assuming it to be two rooms deep, we found it indeed a large pile. But when we got around to the side, we found it to be about as deep as it is wide, so it became truly immense. The palace was built by the Duke of Buckingham in the early l700's, and sold to King George III a little before the Revolutionary War. It has been the London base for the court since the l820's, and of course Queen Elizabeth lives there now.
After the Palace, we walked on another three blocks to Victoria Station, caught the tube to Kensington High, & walked home, arriving at around 6:00. On the way home I stopped by the newsstand to get this week's Barron's, but it wasn't there. Last Sunday it was there, but today it was not. Tragic. Nothing to do but to burn with curiosity until Monday morning...

Monday: Now Monday night, l0-28. This morning I woke up early, and walked up to the newsstand to get Barron's, and again it wasn't there. Something fiendish is going on. Maybe there is a conspiracy. I settled for the Wall Street Journal Europe, and walked on to MacDonald's to read it (there are MacDonald's everywhere) and drink coffee for an hour. Then back home.
Today Susan had a baby-sitter, so she & Tina & I set out together. We decided to go by bus, since Tina and I had never done that. Our bus was a number 10 bus. Different number buses follow different routes, but you have to know what you want before you get to the bus stop, or do some mighty fast reading. We had consulted a bus map beforehand, and knew that to get to our target we needed to ride Bus No. 10. When it came it discharged two or three passengers, but the conductor (each doubledecker bus has a driver and a conductor) wouldn't let us on. It was jamb full. But how did the two or three who got off get on?
Good luck for us, though. Not more than 5 minutes later, another Number 10 came up, and it was nearly empty. We went to the upper deck, and got the best seats in the house - the front seats, with a big picture-window glass in front of us, and others at the sides. Incidentally, at some stops the Number 10 stops no matter what, but at others the sign says "Request Stop," which means that you have to request it to stop, which in turn means that you have to leap out in front of it with upraised hand, like Tarzan stopping Tantor.
Our destination was the Wallace Collection, a collection of painting and objets d'art assembled by several generations of one family. Tina found it in Fodors and it sounded good, so we decided to go, partly because it is just off Oxford Street, a ritzy shopping area where there are many fine department stores, etc. It is housed in the Hertford House, a l790's mansion built by the Duke of Manchester, leased to the Spanish Embassy, leased to the Marquess of Hertford who was apparently attracted by the good duckshooting available in the area, leased to the French Embassy, then came into the hands of the Wallace family, who began filling it up with works of art, expanding it, filling it up again, and so on. The last male Wallace discussed with his friends the idea of leaving the great collection to the nation, but when he died he left it all to his wife, whom he married after she had been his mistress for many years, and had borne him at least one child. I have seen her picture. She was a large heavy woman, not a bit attractive (to me), and not a bit friendly (in the picture, at least). She was an assistant in a perfumer's shop in Paris when this enormously rich man met her. After his death she led a secluded life. There is no evidence that she had any great enthusiasm for the collection. It was almost certainly her loyal desire to fulfill her husband's wishes that led her to devise the collection to the people of England.
We began going through the first room, and we were immediately so struck with its charm and beauty that we decided we needed somebody to tell us about it. It is like the Freer in New York - the house itself is beautiful, so are the furnishings, and then one comes to the art itself. A guided tour was set to begin at 1:00, so we left for Oxford Street, to return for the tour. We walked down the street, crowded with shops and department stores. The streets were the most crowded I've seen in London, nearly like Fifth Avenue in New York, on a busy day. We went to the Liberty department store, which had been recommended by Susan's babysitter Robin. It is much out of the ordinary. The outer walls are Tudor, the interior is all dark wood, the rooms were small (as opposed to Selfridges, which we walked thru without stopping, and which has an open ground floor about 300 feet wide),and the merchandise was first-rate and not that pricey, although certainly not cheap. We all thought it a great place to shop, & Susan said she would definitely be going back there.
Then back to the Wallace Collection, a hurried walk. On the way we stopped in the Pret a Manger in a corner of Selfridges and grabbed some sandwiches and drinks & took then to the benches in front of Hertford House, & ate them until it was time to go in. A five-minute lunch.
Our guide was Lady ????? - none of us caught the name. She took a different tack from most guides. Instead of going through the rooms, talking about what was in them, she selected the subject of Greek and Roman myths, as illustrated by the art in the Collection. She then went from room to room, pointing out the painting and sculpture and furniture which were inspired wholly or partly by Greek and Roman myths. She told us the myth each time; and although I know the myths a little bit it was good to hear them again, and she added things I didn't know. The story of Perseus & Andromeda is a good one, and there is a picture by Titian based on that which I liked a lot. She was witty, and knowledgeable, and it was an excellent tour. It makes you realize how much there is to see in a collection like this, when you spend an hour listening to such a lecture and then realize you've only been through about 3 or 4 galleries, and talked about less than a third of the artistic works in those 3 or 4, and there are 25 galleries. We certainly want to go back there again. There are beautiful old French clocks, and cabinets heavy with wood carving, elaborate writing-desks, vases, armor, medallions, miniatures, guns, daggers, cross-bows, swords, jewelry, goblets, cut glass, plates, platters, stoneware, sculpture, statuary, etc - everything you can think of. Tina wants me to be sure to mention the grand staircase, which faces you as soon as you enter the house proper. And paintings, paintings, paintings. Rembrandt, Rubens, Titian, Velasquez, Gainsborough, Reynolds, etc. etc. - all are here. But no American art, and nothing Oriental, come to think of it. And nothing impressionistic - the assembling of the collection ended in about l880 or so.

Tuesday: Now Tuesday night, 10-29, our last night here. This morning I checked for Barron's again, and it was there. Went up to MacDonalds and read it, then lounged about the apartment until lunch. Around 10:45 Tina & Susan took Madeleine to Mini Muscles exercise class, which consists of a lot of little 2- & 3-year girls and boys bouncing around on a padded floor, but apparently it was great fun for Tina & Madeleine, & maybe Susan.
At noon Tina and I set out to Westminster Abbey, our last event. We did take the guided tour, with London Walks. The guide wasn't quite as good as the one we had the first day, but it was still well worth the money and we saw and learned a lot more than if we had tried to do it by ourselves. I was particularly impressed by what we learned about Edward the Confessor, who built the original abbey at this spot, and by the beautiful stonework on the ceiling and walls above and near his tomb - infinitely superior to anything I've ever seen before - and by the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (it was Britain's idea - we copied them), and by the massive but not-at-all-ornate wooden chair, with the Stone of Scone fitted into it beneath the seat, on which generations of naughty choirs-boys have carved their initials. Imagine that! This is the chair in which kings and queens have sat while being crowned, for 700 years, & it has names & initials carved all over it.
Tomorrow our plane flies at 10:55, so we need to leave the apartment around 8:00 a. m. We lay over in Charlotte for an hour and 40 minutes, and arrive in Wilmington at 10:5l London time, or 5:5l Wilmington time.
It's been a great trip!