of the duchess) to bring me with her. I started on this journey to
the country with all possible delight, little surmising the agonies

that lay in store for me in the mercifully hidden future.
The tapestries were perfect, and Lady Veratrum was most amiable and

affable, though the blue blood of the Belladonnas courses in her
veins, and her great-grandfather was the celebrated Earl of Rhus

Tox, who rendered such notable service to his sovereign. We roamed
through the splendid apartments, inspected the superb picture-

gallery, where scores of dead-and-gone Cimicifugases (most of them
very plain) were glorified by the art of Van Dyck, Sir Joshua, or

Gainsborough, and admired the priceless collections of marbles and
cameos and bronzes. It was about four o'clock when we were

conducted to a magnificentapartment for a brief rest, as we were to
return to London at half-past six. As Lady Veratrum left us, she

remarked casually, 'His Grace will join us at tea.'
The door closed, and at the same moment I fell upon the brocaded

satin state bed and tore off my hat and gloves like one distraught.
"Hilda," I gasped, "you brought me here, and you must rescue me, for

I absolutely decline to drink tea with a duke."
"Nonsense, Penelope, don't be absurd," she replied. "I have never

happened to see him myself, and I am a triflenervous, but it cannot
be very terrible, I should think."

"Not to you, perhaps, but to me impossible," I said. "I thought he
was in Homburg, or I would never have entered this place. It is not

that I fear nobility. I could meet Her Majesty the Queen at the
Court of St. James without the slightest flutter of embarrassment,

because I know I could trust her not to presume on my
defencelessness to enter into conversation with me. But this duke,

whose dukedom very likely dates back to the hour of the Norman
Conquest, is a very different person, and is to be met under very

different circumstances. He may ask me my politics. Of course I
can tell him that I am a Mugwump, but what if he asks me why I am a

Mugwump?"
"He will not," Hilda answered. "Englishmen are not whollydevoid of

feeling!"
"And how shall I address him?" I went on. "Does one call him 'your

Grace,' or 'your Royal Highness'? Oh for a thousandth-part of the
unblushing impertinence of that countrywoman of mine who called your

future king 'Tummy'! but she was a beauty, and I am not pretty
enough to be anything but discreetly well-mannered. Shall you sit

in his presence, or stand and grovel alternately? Does one have to
curtsy? Very well, then, make any excuses you like for me, Hilda:

say I'm eccentric, say I'm deranged, say I'm a Nihilist. I will
hide under the scullery table, fling myself in the moat, lock myself

in the keep, let the portcullis fall on me, die any appropriate
early English death,--anything rather than curtsy in a tailor-made

gown; I can kneel beautifully, Hilda, if that will do: you
remember my ancestors were brought up on kneeling, and yours on

curtsying, and it makes a great difference in the muscles."
Hilda smiled benignantly as she wound the coil of russet hair round

her shapely head. "He will think whatever you do charming, and
whatever you say brilliant," she said; "that is the advantage in

being an American woman."
Just at this moment Lady Veratrum sent a haughty maid to ask us if

we would meet her under the trees in the park which surrounds the
house. I hailed this as a welcome reprieve to the dreaded function

of tea with the duke, and made up my mind, while descending the
marble staircase, that I would slip away and lose myself

accidentally in the grounds, appearing only in time for the London
train. This happy mode of issue from my difficulties lent a

springiness to my step, as we followed a waxwork footman over the
velvet sward to a nook under a group of copper beeches. But there,

to my dismay, stood a charmingly appointed tea-table glittering with
silver and Royal Worcester, with several liveried servants bringing

cakes and muffins and berries to Lady Veratrum, who sat behind the
steaming urn. I started to retreat, when there appeared, walking

towards us, a simple man, with nothing in the least extraordinary
about him.

"That cannot be the Duke of Cimicifugas," thought I, "a man in a
corduroy jacket, without a sign of a suite; probably it is a

Banished Duke come from the Forest of Arden for a buttered muffin."
But it was the Duke of Cimicifugas, and no other. Hilda was

presented first, while I tried to fire my courage by thinking of the
Puritan Fathers, and Plymouth Rock, and the Boston Tea-Party, and

the battle of Bunker Hill. Then my turn came. I murmured some
words which might have been anything, and curtsied in a stiff-necked

self-respecting sort of way. Then we talked,--at least the duke and
Lady Veratrum talked. Hilda said a few blameless words, such as

befitted an untitled English virgin in the presence of the nobility;
while I maintained the probationary silence required by Pythagoras

of his first year's pupils. My idea was to observe this first duke
without uttering a word, to talk with the second (if I should ever

meet a second), to chat with the third, and to secure the fourth for
Francesca to take home to America with her.

Of course I know that dukes are very dear, but she could afford any
reasonable sum, if she found one whom she fancied; the principal

obstacle in the path is that tiresome American lawyer with whom she
considers herself in love. I have never gone beyond that first

experience, however, for dukes in England are as rare as snakes in
Ireland. I can't think why they allow them to die out so,--the

dukes, not the snakes. If a country is to have an aristocracy, let
there be enough of it, say I, and make it imposing at the top, where

it shows most, especially since, as I understand it, all that
Victoria has to do is to say, 'Let there be dukes,' and there are

dukes.
Chapter VIII. Tuppenny travels in London.

If one really wants to know London, one must live there for years
and years.

This sounds like a reasonable and sensible statement, yet the moment
it is made I retract it, as quite misleading and altogether too

general.
We have a charming English friend who has not been to the Tower

since he was a small boy, and begs us to conduct him there on the
very next Saturday. Another has not seen Westminster Abbey for

fifteen years, because he attends church at St. Dunstan's-in-the-
East. Another says that he should like to have us 'read up' London

in the red-covered Baedeker, and then show it to him, properly and
systematically. Another, a flower of the nobility, confesses that

he never mounted the top of an omnibus in the evening for the sake
of seeing London after dark, but that he thinks it would be rather

jolly, and that he will join us in such a democratic journey at any
time we like.

We think we get a kind of vague apprehension of what London means
from the top of a 'bus better than anywhere else, and this vague

apprehension is as much as the thoughtful or imaginative observer
will ever arrive at in a lifetime. It is too stupendous to be

comprehended. The mind is dazed by its distances, confused by its
contrasts; tossed from the spectacle of its wealth to the

contemplation of its poverty, the brilliancy of its extravagances to
the stolidity of its miseries, the luxuries that blossom in Mayfair

to the brutalities that lurk in Whitechapel.
We often set out on a fine morning, Salemina and I, and travel

twenty miles in the day, though we have to double our twopenny fee
several times to accomplish that distance.

We never know whither we are going, and indeed it is not a matter of
great moment (I mean to a woman) where everything is new and

strange, and where the driver, if one is fortunate enough to be on a
front seat, tells one everything of interest along the way, and

instructs one regarding a different route back to town.
We have our favourite 'buses, of course; but when one appears, and

we jump on while it is still in motion, as the conductor seems to
prefer, and pull ourselves up the cork-screw stairway,--not a simple