Seven English Cities eBook

in the books, where, I dare say, the heroines were always prying the heroes’ hands open.  On every seat one found them poring upon the glowing page, and met them in every walk with a volume under the arm, and another clasped to the heart.  At places where the hand played, and they were ostensibly listening to the music, they were bowed upon their books, and the flutter of the turning leaves almost silenced the blare of the horns.  By what inspiration they knew when God Save the King was coming, and rose with a long sigh heaved in common, I should not be able to say.  Perhaps they always reached the end of a story at the time the band came to that closing number, or perhaps they felt its imminence in their nerves.  The fiction was not confined to the young girls, however.  Both sexes and all ages partook of it; I saw as many old girls as young girls reading novels, and mothers of families were apparently as much addicted to the indulgence.  I suppose they put by their books when they took tea, which is the other most noticeable dissipation in England.  But I cannot enter upon that chapter; it is too large a theme; I will say, merely, that as the saloons are on Sixth Avenue, so the tea-rooms are in every part of the island.

[Illustration:  LEADS A LIFE OF GAYETY ON THE SANDS]

XVIII

It had seemed to me in former visits to England that the Christian Sabbath was a more depressing day there than here, but from the last I have a more cheerful memory of it.  I still felt it dispiriting in London, where as many fled from it as could, and where the empty streets symbolized a world abandoned to destruction; but this was mainly in the forenoon.  Even then, the markets and fairs in the avenues given up to them were the scenes of an activity which was not without gayety, and certainly not without noise; and when the afternoon came, the lower classes, such as had remained in town, thronged to the public houses, and the upper classes to the evening parade in the Park.  As to the relative amount of church-going, I will not even assume to be sure; but I have a fancy that it is a rite much less rigorous than it used to be.  Still, in provincial places, I found the churches full on a Sunday morning, and all who could afford it hallowed the day by putting on a frock-coat and a top-hat, which are not worn outside of London on week-days.  The women, of course, were always in their best on Sunday.  Perhaps in the very country the upper classes go to church as much as formerly, but I have my doubts whether they feel so much obliged to it in conformity to usage, or for the sake of example to their inferiors.  Where there are abbeys and minsters and cathedrals, as there are pretty well everywhere in England, religion is an attractive spectacle, and one could imagine people resorting to its functions for aesthetic reasons.