I don't admire the Houses of Parliament half so much as
that stone-fronted mansion with real glass windows, and door-steps,
and a real balcony--greener than I ever see now, except at watering
places; and even they afford but a poor imitation. And though it
DID open all at once, the entire house-front (which was a blow, I
admit, as cancelling the fiction of a staircase), it was but to shut
it up again, and I could believe. Even open, there were three
distinct rooms in it: a sitting-room and bed-room, elegantly
furnished, and best of all, a kitchen, with uncommonly soft fire-
irons, a plentiful assortment of diminutive utensils--oh, the
warming-pan!--and a tin man-cook in profile, who was always going to
fry two fish. What Barmecide justice have I done to the noble
feasts wherein the set of wooden platters figured, each with its own
peculiar delicacy, as a ham or turkey, glued tight on to it, and
garnished with something green, which I recollect as moss! Could
all the Temperance Societies of these later days, united, give me
such a tea-drinking as I have had through the means of yonder little
set of blue crockery, which really would hold liquid (it ran out of
the small wooden cask, I recollect, and tasted of matches), and
which made tea, nectar. And if the two legs of the ineffectual
little sugar-tongs did tumble over one another, and want purpose,
like Punch's hands, what does it matter? And if I did once shriek
out, as a poisoned child, and strike the fashionable company with
consternation, by reason of having drunk a little teaspoon,
inadvertently dissolved in too hot tea, I was never the worse for
it, except by a powder!
Upon the next branches of the tree, lower down, hard by the green
roller and miniature gardening-tools, how thick the books begin to
hang.
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