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just grateful that we have such a nice, everyday kind of person to travel with,” Honey said.
    Jim nodded absently, watching as Mart buttonholed a tall black man in a purple robe and red turban on the museum steps.
    “Wouldn’t you know?” Jim’s green eyes twinkled. “People of all nationalities visit this center of learning, and Mart seems to want to talk to them all.”
    Trixie looked around at young German scholars with denim knapsacks; Hindu women in turquoise or lemon-colored silk saris; smiling, bespectacled Japanese and Chinese students; white-collared clergymen and midiskirted nuns; and chattering French teenagers. All were streaming in and out of the huge gray buildings.
    Then Trixie caught sight of a more familiar figure, lurking behind the pillar at the iron gate.
    “There! There he is!” She pointed wildly. “That little creep—in the gray cap—”
    “Where?” Honey and Jim both looked, but the pickpocket had already slithered into the crowd.
    “Are you sure it was him?” Honey asked.
    “Sure, I’m sure,” Trixie cried. “He must be following us!”
    “But why would he do that?” Honey asked with a little shiver.
    Trixie thought for a moment. “Well, don’t you remember how I told you that I’m almost sure I saw him in the Hall of Kings, when you were showing us the Queen’s necklace?” Trixie spoke slowly, figuring it out as she went along. “And we were talking really loud about your necklace. And then he went for your bag down in the Chamber of Horrors...
    “But it wasn’t in my handbag,” Honey protested.
    She looked anxiously about.
    “He wouldn’t know that,” Trixie pointed out. “And besides,” she whispered, “it is today!” They had taken it along with them to compare it with the exhibits of Elizabethan jewelry in the museum.
    “Maybe we’d better—” Jim was starting to say, when Mart sauntered over.
    “Well,” Mart said, “let’s go. My African friend says we should take a bus instead of the tube. He says you can see a lot of London from the top deck.”
    “Great idea,” Jim agreed. “We’ll get away from that pickpocket, too.”
    “I’m sure he’s following us,” Trixie muttered stubbornly as they climbed the narrow winding steps of a swaying double-decker. According to a sign on the big red omnibus, it was going to Piccadilly Circus.
    “A circus!” Honey said. “That sounds like fun. We can get off there.”
    “Circus is a British expression for a circular area where streets intersect,” Jim told her. “They have a lot of circles and squares, with monuments or parks, in London.”
    “Unequivocally speaking,” Mart spouted happily, “Piccadilly Circus is a circumbendibus plaza near the point that is approximately equidistant from the extremities of the city.”
    A young English girl leaned toward them, looking puzzled but friendly. “Piccadilly’s the next stop,” she said helpfully.
    “Oh, how do we stop the bus?” Honey asked.
    The girl pointed to a sign which read, STRIP ONCE IN ADVANCE.
    “Strip once in advance?” The Bob-Whites were so baffled that the girl pulled the cord for them, grinning broadly, and they all burst out laughing together.
    “English and American are two whole different languages, sometimes,” Mart said.
    The circular plaza turned out to be not only the center of London, as Mart had said, but also its center of activity. The Americans hopped off the bus and stared goggle-eyed at the rushing traffic that swirled around the central statue, and at the sidewalks that were packed with shoppers.
    “It reminds me of Times Square in New York,” Trixie said. “I bet it’s really lit up here at night, with all those neon signs.”
    Big red buses, along with bicycles, vans, and toysized foreign cars, clogged the street. Long-haired youths lounged on the steps of the gilded statue of Eros, the god of love, at the center of Piccadilly Circus. The morning rain had ended, and the glass storefronts were