On Thursday I went into London by one of the morning trains, and wandered about all day,--visiting the Exhibition of the Royal Academy, and Westminster Abbey and St. Paul's, the two latter of which I have already written about in former journals. On Friday, S-----, J-----, and I walked over the heath, and through the Park to Greenwich, and spent some hours in the Hospital. The painted hall struck me much more than at my first view of it; it is very beautiful indeed, and the effect of its frescoed ceiling most rich and magnificent, the assemblage of glowing hues producing a general result of splendor. . . .

In the evening I went with Mr. and Mrs. ------ to a conversazione at Mrs. Newton Crosland's, who lives on Blackheath. . . . I met with one person who interested me,--Mr. Bailey, the author of Festus; and I was surprised to find myself already acquainted with him. It is the same Mr. Bailey whom I met a few months ago, when I first dined at Mr. -----'s,--a dark, handsome, rather picturesque-looking man, with a gray beard, and dark hair, a little dimmed with gray. He is of quiet and very agreeable deportment, and I liked him and believed in him. . . . There is sadness glooming out of him, but no unkindness nor asperity. Mrs. Crosland's conversazione was enriched with a supper, and terminated with a dance, in which Mr. ------ joined with heart and soul, but Mrs. ------ went to sleep in her chair, and I would gladly have followed her example if I could have found a chair to sit upon. In the course of the evening I had some talk with a pale, nervous young lady, who has been a noted spiritual medium.

Yesterday I went into town by the steamboat from Greenwich to London Bridge, with a nephew of Mr. ------'s, and, calling at his place of business, he procured us an order from his wine-merchants, by means of which we were admitted into

THE WINE-VAULTS OF THE LONDON DOCKS.

We there found parties, with an acquaintance, who was going, with two French gentlemen, into the vaults. It is a good deal like going down into a mine, each visitor being provided with a lamp at the end of a stick; and following the guide along dismal passages, running beneath the streets, and extending away interminably,--roughly arched overhead with stone, from which depend festoons of a sort of black fungus, caused by the exhalations of the wine. Nothing was ever uglier than this fungus. It is strange that the most ethereal effervescence of rich wine can produce nothing better.