_There’s not another Hat-mart in the town_ _Which casts such lustre on the human crown._
Left to himself he would have liked a wideawake, but that _arbiter elegantiarum_, the small boy, he was warned, had not quite acquiesced in that. If it was not a coat of many buttons that he now sported, it was scrimp enough to show off the fine lines of his figure; for the movement towards ample waistcoats and wide trousers was not yet encouraged by his Aldgate mentors, and pockets on the hips had been conceded him with reluctance. In his large American trunk reposed a still grander suit of Sunday sable, though he had shied at a frock coat, and was glad to learn from these hierophants of the mode that morning jackets were no longer confined to the stable-yard or the barrack-room, but were permissible even in the country house—and there was no question but Frog Farm was that. He had already worn his blacks once, on his visit to the Great Exhibition, and they made, he found, a distinct difference to the policemen in top-hats whose guidance he sought in the labyrinths of the metropolis.
The delay in this visit to the Exhibition—the goal of his journey to London—had turned out an advantage, he felt, giving him time for these measured elegancies. If he had been unable to be in at the opening, as he had grandly designed in Canada when ignorant that this involved guineas and season-tickets, he had managed to squeeze for a glimpse of the Queen outside if not inside the Park, and the first five-shilling day—after all, only the fourth—was grandeur enough for a whilom ploughboy and cabin-boy. Although nine ten-pound notes made a warm waistcoat-lining, he was not under the illusion that he had returned with more than a competence.
One would have thought London itself a Greater Exhibition to a young man who had never seen it before: especially London at carnival with its colossal crowds swollen by visitors from all countries in all complexions and costumes: London with its numberless gay ’buses (plying mostly to Hyde Park), its swifter gliding cabriolets of the new pattern invented by Mr. Hansom, and the more stolid procession of four-wheeled clarences, not to mention the fashionable and civic carriages with the scarlet-and-gold pomp of flunkeys and outriders: London with its countless curious street-criers, costermongers, ballad-mongers, watercress sellers, muffin and hot-pie men, birdcage dealers, tract-peddling Lascars in white robes, and vendors of everything from corn-salves to speeches on the scaffold; blowsy, rowdy London that turned into a dream-city when those strange figures with rods glided through the twilight, flecking the long, grey streets with points of fire.