Ten Years of Upper Canada in Peace and War, 1805-1815; Being the Ridout Letters (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER V. GOSSIP FKOM LONDON, 1811. From Thomas G .Ridout to his Brother in York: ? London, 26th September, 1811, I Peomised to tell yon how the poor Canadian felt when London saw him. After riding all the morning of the 13th ult. over Bagshot Heath, we arrived at the River Thames, at a large brick town called Staines. Here the river is not larger than the Don. It is twenty miles from London; from thence we saw Windsor Castle, and the royal flag flying. Next, entered upon Hounslow Heath, over which we rattled, and presently came to a long street, eight miles from Hyde Park Corner, and drove through a multitude of waggons, coaches and people in crowds. We drove through Hyde Park gate in high style, with six fine horses, into Piccadilly. The houses are four or five stories high on each side, built of a brown kind of brick; the lower stories of the houses are nothing but a long glass frame, from one street to another, and so throughout the city, on both sides, and of the largest kind of glass, and the houses are supported by iron posts. The sides of the streets are paved with large, square, flat stones, and posts on each side to keep the carriages off; the middle with thick, oblong stones, and rounding, like our stones, but rather muddy. In the middle of the streets stood a long line of Hackney coaches waiting for employment; on each side of them was a long row of coaches, waggons, carts and gigs, one going down and the other coming up. The footways were crowded with theLondon bucks and ladies, dressed in the neatest manner; chimney sweeps, coalheavers, porters; fish and fruit women, with their stalls and wheel-barrows; men, women, butcher's trays, dog-carts, and children, and old blind fiddlers?racket and riot, jostling, insomuch that I wished myself in the woods a...