BEGENT STREET. 97 



CHAPTER XI. 



SPECTRES AND GHOSTS. 



ONE of the principal cross streets of London is Regent 

 Street. It crosses the great thoroughfares which run 

 lengthwise through the vast city, and which are the scenes 

 of the principal movement to and fro, being filled in all the 

 business hours of the day with long lines of cabs, and om- 

 nibuses, and drays, and coaches, and carriages of all sorts. 

 These long thoroughfares, extending for many miles, are 

 lined with shops of every kind; but Regent Street, which 

 crosses them in the gayest and most fashionable part of the 

 town, is emphatically the street of shops, or stores as we 

 call them in America ; for the goods, and wares, and ob- 

 jects of interest and curiosity, and the novelties of dress, 

 and articles for presents, and books, and engravings, are 

 more numerous and splendid, and more tastefully arranged 

 behind the great windows of plate-glass here than in any 

 other part of London. If you wish to buy any curious or 

 pretty thing to bring home with you as a souvenir of Lon- 

 don, there is not a better place to look for it than Regent 

 Street. 



There is one part of the street that is more splendid than 

 the rest. At the lower end of it, where it approaches the 

 region of the houses of Parliament, the club-houses, and 

 the palaces of the old nobility, it makes a grand sweep in 

 the form of a quarter of a circle. This part of the street 

 is known, in fact, as the Quadrant ; and as the buildings on 

 each side are uniform in architecture throughout the whole 

 length of it, and as the shops are, if possible, more gay and 

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