One can hardly believe that there is a seamy side when one descends from his travelling observatory a little later, and stands on Westminster Bridge, or walks along the Thames Embankment.

The lights of Parliament House gleam from a hundred windows, and in the dark shadows by the banks thousands of coloured discs of light twinkle and dance and glow like fairy lamps, and are reflected in the silver surface of the river.

That river, as full of mystery and contrast in its course as London itself--where is such another?
It has ever been a river of pageants, a river of sighs; a river into whose placid depths kings and queens, princes and cardinals, have whispered state secrets, and poets have breathed immortal lines; a stream of pleasure, bearing daily on its bosom such a freight of youth and mirth and colour and music as no other river in the world can boast.
Sometimes we sally forth in search of adventures in the thick of a 'London particular,' Mr.Guppy's phrase for a fog.

When you are once ensconced in your garden seat by the driver, you go lumbering through a world of bobbing shadows, where all is weird, vague, grey, dense; and where great objects loom up suddenly in the mist and then disappear; where the sky, heavy and leaden, seems to descend bodily upon your head, and the air is full of a kind of luminous yellow smoke.
A Lipton's Tea 'bus is the only one we can see plainly in this sort of weather, and so we always take it.

I do not wish, however, to be followed literally in these modest suggestions for omnibus rides, because I am well aware that they are not sufficiently specific for the ordinary tourist who wishes to see London systematically and without any loss of time.