We are now a little farther from the
Exhibition, and not much better off as regards accommodation, but the
housekeeper is a pleasant, civil sort of a woman, auspiciously named Mrs.
Honey. The house is a specimen of the poorer middle-class dwellings as
built nowadays,--narrow staircase, thin walls, and, being constructed for
sale, very ill put together indeed,--the floors with wide cracks between
the boards, and wide crevices admitting both air and light over the
doors, so that the house is full of draughts. The outer walls, it seems
to me, are but of one brick in thickness, and the partition walls
certainly no thicker; and the movements, and sometimes the voices, of
people in the contiguous house are audible to us. The Exhibition has
temporarily so raised the value of lodgings here that we have to pay a
high price for even such a house as this.
Mr. Wilding having gone on a tour to Scotland, I had to be at the
Consulate every day last week till yesterday; when I absented myself from
duty, and went to the Exhibition. U---- and I spent an hour together,
looking principally at the old Dutch masters, who seem to me the most
wonderful set of men that ever handled a brush. Such lifelike
representations of cabbages, onions, brass kettles, and kitchen crockery;
such blankets, with the woollen fuzz upon them; such everything I never
thought that the skill of man could produce! Even the photograph cannot
equal their miracles.
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