Pomonas Travels | Page 2

Pomona the improvement showed itself principally in her methods of expression, and although she could not be called at the time of these travels an educated woman, she was by no means an ignorant one.
When the daughter was old enough she was allowed to accept an invitation from her grandmother to spend the summer in the country, and Pomona determined that it was the duty of herself and husband to avail themselves of this opportunity for foreign travel.
Accordingly, one fine spring morning, Pomona, still a young woman, and Jonas, not many years older, but imbued with a semi-pathetic complaisance beyond his years, embarked for England and Scotland, to which countries it was determined to limit their travels. The letters which follow were written in consequence of the earnest desire of Euphemia to have a full account of the travels and foreign impressions of her former handmaiden. Pruned of dates, addresses, signatures, and of many personal and friendly allusions, these letters are here presented as Pomona wrote them to Euphemia.

Letter Number One
[Illustration]
LONDON
The first thing Jone said to me when I told him I was going to write about what I saw and heard was that I must be careful of two things. In the first place, I must not write a lot of stuff that everybody ought to be expected to know, especially people who have travelled themselves; and in the second place, I must not send you my green opinions, but must wait until they were seasoned, so that I can see what they are good for before I send them.
"But if I do that," said I, "I will get tired of them long before they are seasoned, and they will be like a bundle of old sticks that I wouldn't offer to anybody." Jone laughed at that, and said I might as well send them along green, for, after all, I wasn't the kind of a person to keep things until they were seasoned, to see if I liked them. "That's true," said I, "there's a great many things, such as husbands and apples, that I like a good deal better fresh than dry. Is that all the advice you've got to give?"
"For the present," said he; "but I dare say I shall have a good deal more as we go along."
"All right," said I, "but be careful you don't give me any of it green. Advice is like gooseberries, that's got to be soft and ripe, or else well cooked and sugared, before they're fit to take into anybody's stomach."
Jone was standing at the window of our sitting-room when I said this, looking out into the street. As soon as we got to London we took lodgings in a little street running out of the Strand, for we both want to be in the middle of things as long as we are in this conglomerate town, as Jone calls it. He says, and I think he is about right, that it is made up of half a dozen large cities, ten or twelve towns, at least fifty villages, more than a hundred little settlements, or hamlets, as they call them here, and about a thousand country houses scattered along around the edges; and over and above all these are the inhabitants of a large province, which, there being no province to put them into, are crammed into all the cracks and crevices so as to fill up the town and pack it solid.
When we was in London before, with you and your husband, madam, and we lost my baby in Kensington Gardens, we lived, you know, in a peaceful, quiet street by a square or crescent, where about half the inhabitants were pervaded with the solemnities of the past and the other half bowed down by the dolefulness of the present, and no way of getting anywhere except by descending into a movable tomb, which is what I always think of when we go anywhere in the underground railway. But here we can walk to lots of things we want to see, and if there was nothing else to keep us lively the fear of being run over would do it, you may be sure.
But, after all, Jone and me didn't come here to London just to see the town. We have ideas far ahead of that. When we was in London before I saw pretty nearly all the sights, for when I've got work like that to do I don't let the grass grow under my feet, and what we want to do on this trip is to see the country part of England and Scotland. And in order to see English country life just as it is, we both agreed that the best thing to do was to take a little house in the country and