October 3d.--I again went into the city yesterday forenoon, to settle
about the passages to Lisbon, taking J----- with me. From Hungerford
Bridge we took the steamer to London Bridge, that being an easy and
speedy mode of accomplishing distances that take many footsteps through
the crowded thoroughfares. After leaving the steamer-office, we went
back through the Strand, and, crossing Waterloo Bridge, walked a good way
on to the Surrey side of the river; a coarse, dingy, disagreeable suburb,
with shops apparently for country produce, for old clothes, second-hand
furniture, for ironware, and other things bulky and inelegant. How many
scenes and sorts of life are comprehended within London! There was much
in the aspect of these streets that reminded me of a busy country village
in America on an immensely magnified scale.
Growing rather weary anon, we got into an omnibus, which took us as far
as the Surrey Zoological Gardens, which J----- wished very much to see.
They proved to be a rather poor place of suburban amusement; poor, at
least, by daylight, their chief attraction for the public consisting in
out-of-door representations of battles and sieges. The storming of
Sebastopol (as likewise at the Cremorne Gardens) was advertised for the
evening, and we saw the scenery of Sebastopol, painted on a vast scale,
in the open air, and really looking like miles and miles of hill and
water; with a space for the actual manoeuvring of ships on a sheet of
real water in front of the scene, on which some ducks were now swimming
about, in place of men-of-war.
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