CHAPTER V.
JACK SEES LONDON AND THE GREAT PHILOSOPHER The stir and prodigious reach of London had appalled the young man.
His fancy had built and peopled it, but having found no sufficient material for its task in New York, Boston and Philadelphia, had scored a failure.

It had built too small and too humbly.

He was in no way prepared for the noise, the size, the magnificence, the beauty of it.
In spite of that, something in his mental inheritance had soon awakened a sense of recognition and familiarity.

He imagined that the sooty odor and the bells, and the clatter of wheels and horses' feet and the voices--the air was full of voices--were like the echoes of a remote past.
The thought thrilled him that somewhere in the great crowd, of which he was now a part, were the two human beings he had come so far to see.
He put on his best clothes and with the letter which had been carefully treasured--under his pillow at night and pinned to his pocket lining through the day--set out in a cab for the lodgings of Doctor Franklin.
Through a maze of streets where people were "thick as the brush in the forests of Tryon County" he proceeded until after a journey of some thirty minutes the cab stopped at the home of the famous American on Bloomsbury Square.

Doctor Franklin was in and would see him presently, so the liveried servant informed the young man after his card had been taken to the Doctor's office.