Katy found this idea rather pretty, and willingly stopped at Covent Garden, where they bought a bunch of late roses for eighteen pence, which entirely satisfied Amy. With them in her hand, and Mabel in her arms, she led the way through the dim aisles of the Abbey, through grates and doors, and up and down steps, the guide following, but not at all needed, for Amy seemed to have a perfectly clear recollection of every turn and winding. When the chapel was reached, she laid the roses on the tomb with gentle fingers, and a pitiful, reverent look in her grey eyes. Then she lifted Mabel up to kiss the odd little baby effigy above the marble quilt, whereupon the guide seemed altogether surprised out of his composure, and remarked to Katy:

`Little miss is an h'American, as is plain to see; no h'English child would be likely to think of doing such a thing.'

`Do not English children take any interest in the tombs of the Abbey?' asked Katy.

`Oh, yes, m'm - h'interest; but they don't take no special notice of one tomb above h'another.'

Katy could scarcely keep from laughing, especially as she heard Amy, who had been listening to the conversation, give an audible sniff, and inform Mabel that she was glad she was not an English child who didn't notice things, and liked grown-up graves as much as she did dear little cunning ones like this!

Later in the day, when Mrs Ashe was better, they all drove together to the quaint old keep which has been the scene of so many tragedies, and is known as the Tower of London. Here they were shown various rooms and chapels and prisons, including the apartments where Queen Elizabeth, when a friendless young princess, was shut up for many months by her sister, Queen Mary. Katy had read somewhere, and now told Amy, the pretty legend of the four little children who lived with their parents in the Tower, and used to play with the royal captive; and how one little boy brought her a key which he had picked up on the ground, and said, `Now you can go out when you will, lady'; and how the Lords of the Council, getting wind of it, sent for the children to question them, and frightened them and their friends almost to death, and forbade them to go near the princess again.

A story about children always brings the past much nearer to a child, and Amy's imagination was so excited by this tale that when they got to the darksome closet which is said to have been the prison of Sir Walter Raleigh, she marched out of it with a pale and wrathful face.

`If this is English history, I never mean to learn any more of it, and neither shall Mabel,' she declared.

But it is not possible for Amy or anyone else not to learn a great deal of history simply by going about London. So many places are associated with people or events, and seeing the places makes one care so much more for the people or the events that one insensibly questions and wonders. Katy, who had `browsed' all through her childhood in a good old-fashioned library, had her memory stuffed with all manner of little scraps of information and literary allusions, which now came into use. It was like owning the disjointed bits of a puzzle, and suddenly discovering that properly put together they make a pattern. Mrs Ashe, who had never been much of a reader, considered her young friend a prodigy of intelligence; but Katy herself realized how inadequate and inexact her knowledge was, and how many bits were missing from the pattern of her puzzle. She wished with all her heart, as everyone wishes under such circumstances, that she had studied harder and more wisely while the chance was in her power. On a journey you cannot read to advantage. Remember that, dear girls, who are looking forward to travelling some day, and be industrious in time.

October is not a favourable month in which to see England. Water, water is everywhere; you breathe it; you absorb it; it wets your clothes and it dampens your spirits. Mrs Ashe's friends advised her not to think of Scotland at that time of the year. One by one their little intended excursions were given up. A single day and night in Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon; a short visit to the Isle of Wight, where, in a country place which seemed provokingly pretty as far as they could see it for the rain, lived that friend of Mrs Ashe who had married an Englishman, and in so doing had, as Katy privately thought, `renounced