CHAPTER IV

Maids in your smocks,Look to your locks,Your fire and your light,And give you good night?

Anyhow, it is a relief to turn from those ghastly trophies on the battlements of the Bridge to this kindly warning with its concluding benediction.

I echo the latter, and am ever yours,

GEORGE.

CARRINGTONMEWS,

7th October.

DEAR Agatha,—I'm glad you were interested in the account of my outing with Mrs. Darling. Your reference to Verdant Green was apposite but not quite kind. I bear no malice, however: witness the continuation of the history of my wanderings.

I have been reading "Pepys' Diary" for what Mrs. Darling would call the "umpteenth" time. Strangely enough, I had never visited his tomb, and it occurred to me that Mrs. Darling and I might make a day of it, starting with Bankside and working round to Hart Street, Seething Lane, by way of Upper Thames Street. We got off our 'bus at Southwark Street because I wanted to see some ancient alms-houses I had been told were tucked away in a side turning near. Alms-houses have an atmosphere of their own which I always find congenial to my age and aspirations—a roof to cover one, food and light, and time to idle: what more could one want! Mrs. Darlingdidn't agree with me. She is not the kind of woman to grow old gracefully. She runs across roads, and would no more dream of sitting over the fire doing nothing for half an hour than she would contemplate wearing caps—I refer to old ladies' caps, not the cloth variety which is the approved head-dress for ladies of her class when doing the morning's shopping.

We found Hopton's Alms-house in Holland Street almost by chance. It is so easy to pass along the end of the street without discovering anything unusual. One sees nothing but an iron railing and a hint of green, and had I not been on the look out, I should have gone my way unconscious of Hopton and the little oasis he had created for his old men and women in this corner of the busy city.

We found that the iron railing shut off a little world of "God's Houses," as they call them in Belgium, from the squalid road and the tall ugly buildings opposite. On a tablet was inscribed the laconic statement, "Chas. Hopton, Esq.: Sole founder of this charity. Anno 1752," and when the winter's gales roar down the chimneys at nights, or the rain beats against the casements, I hope the pensioners sometimes give Charles a grateful thought.

The houses are built in blocks round three sides of a green which is traversed by paved paths andset with trees, one tree in each section. The grass was very green, and pigeons were assembled on the tiled roofs. There were wooden benches placed at intervals, and a sleek cat sat on one of them, whilst some caged birds sang unconcernedly over its head.

I spoke to an old man who stood at the door of one of the houses, and he took us to the back of his dwelling to show us his little garden, in which a few chrysanthemums were making a brave struggle against the city smoke. Each house, he pointed out, had its allotment, but the overshadowing warehouses and factories made gardening a rather thankless task.

Continuing our way we turned into a side street of mean houses, at the end of which the vicinity of the river was disclosed by the rattle and clank of huge cranes as they made their lazy circular movements against the sky.

We were in Shakespeare's world, and Bear Garden's Alley must have been named after the Bear Garden, which was almost next door to the Globe Theatre, where Shakespeare acted. Rose Alley, too, was reminiscent of the Rose Theatre, where Ben Jonson's plays were performed. But what has this dingy wharf to do with the rural scene amidst which those old theatres were placed? Surely there never could have been fields and country lanes in this neighbourhood ofslums, factories, and warehouses! Fields and lanes which would be sweet with the scents of summer evenings, and which Shakespeare must have walked, thinking perhaps of "a bank where wild thyme grows, quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine".

It was low tide, and the river flowing oilily between its banks was of the same hue as the mud. A fog haze lurked in the background all round, and on the opposite side a red-painted barge stood out as if having caught the warmth of a hidden sun. A few moments ago there had been no St. Paul's, but now there grew the vague outline of a vast circumference suspended in the air high above the warehouses opposite. Minute by minute, as the veil-thinned details were born, the sun found the gold cross, and the dome washed with purple rose as at the touch of an enchanter's wand into the sun-rayed vista.

"That'sa place I never bin to," observed Mrs. Darling with an air of conscious virtue. I did not suggest that she should make good the omission. To tell the truth, the outside of St. Paul's makes me happier than the inside. To see its purple dome float in majesty above the sea of house-tops, as unsubstantial as an opium-eater's dream, or to meet its august presence face to face half-way up Ludgate Hill, when the pigeons are wheeling round it like bitsof tinder blown from an unseen fire, is to find that "thing of beauty" which is a "joy for ever". But to go inside is to lose one's identity in a homeless immensity and a wilderness of echoes.

I was reluctant to leave the river-side. It is an ideal spot for "loafing". The men employed on wharves and barges are a class apart from the ordinary workman, it always seems to me. They may not be conscious of it, but the meditative spirit of the lazy tide, the slow-moving barges, and those silent activities of the river's life have instilled in them a poetical and contemplative outlook on existence which no other calling can inspire.

We crossed the river by the temporary bridge, and turning to the right made our way along Upper Thames Street. As we went I meditated on "What's in a name?" the question being suggested by the quaint nomenclature of the courts and alleys of the city. From the stores of my memory I could produce Hanging Sword Alley, Dark House Lane, Passing Alley, Pudding Lane, Hen and Chicken's Court, World's End Passage, Fig Tree Court, Green-Arbour Court, Boss Alley, Maypole Alley, Crucifix Lane, Sugar Loaf Court. And last week I came across a book dated 1732 in which was an alphabetical table of all the streets, courts, lanes, alleys,yards, rows, within the bills of mortality. Some day I'm going to take that old book with me and go on a voyage of discovery. Are Dirty Lane and Deadman's Place still to be found in the parish of Southwark? Is Coffin Alley still in St. Sepulchre's? I'm afraid not, and I'm quite sure that Damnation Alley no longer graces St. Martin's in the Fields.

By way of Fish Street Hill, Eastcheap, Great Tower Street, and Mark Lane we approached St. Olave's in Hart Street. As, however, I wanted to look through the railings at the old churchyard, we turned the corner into Seething Lane, where, on top of the iron gate, is a sinister memento of the Plague. They were weird times, those old days, with their childish spirit of fee-faw-fum, and the skulls and crossbones on top of the gate bring a breath from the dark ages into some moment of to-day. Probably not one person in a hundred notices the skulls or pauses to look through the iron railings and reflect that Pepys himself must have walked down that very pathway between the gravestones on that occasion of which he wrote. "This is the first time I have been in the church since I left London for the Plague," he says, "and it frighted me indeed to go through the church, more than I thought it could have done, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard. I was much troubledat it, and do not think to go through it again a good while." Later he records the reassurance he had experienced in seeing those same graves mantled in snow.

I believe it was the custom when making the entry to add the letter P after the names of those who had perished by the Black Death, but I have never had the privilege of seeing the registers. Mary Ramsey, who is supposed to have brought the Plague into London, is buried in the churchyard.

The church is square, with a columned nave, and the old glass in the large east window sheds a mellow light on some painted figures on a tomb near. The building does not wear its history on its sleeve, but Samuel Pepys (the only man who ever told the unromantic truth about himself) could, if he would, paint pictures of some of the scenes those old walls have witnessed. His body lies beneath the altar, and high above it, on the north-east wall, is the monument to his wife. She has a girl-like, engaging face, the head bent slightly forward as if in the act of listening for some message from her lord and master who lies so silent below.

It is certain that when Pepys was so frank with himself about his weaknesses, he never imagined he was going to have an audience which would last through the centuries. Iwondered as I looked at the sculptured face with its expression a little wistful, and a little supercilious, which of us would care to purchase notoriety at such a price?

Mrs. Darling inquired curiously about the nature of those self-revelations, and as we consumed our chops and baked potatoes, and drank our ale at a little restaurant near, I told her of a certain Cock Tavern opposite the Temple, where Pepys in his diary mentions bringing Mrs. Knipp (an actress of whom his wife was jealous), and where they "drank, eat a lobster and sang and mighty merry till almost midnight". And how these meetings went on until Mrs. Pepys came to the bedside of her husband one night and threatened to pinch him with red-hot tongs.... Whereupon Mrs. Darling found a resemblance between the Essayist and "that other old gentleman in the waxworks". "Saucy kippers," she called them both, bracketing King Charles with the roving Samuel.

In justice to poor Samuel, however, I told the old lady how he had said, "My wife seemed very pretty to-day, it being for the first time I had given her leave to wear a black patch". How on another occasion he records, "Talking with my wife, in whom I never had greater content, blessed be God!" How he had given her five pounds to buy a petticoat, and how he statesthat he is "as happy a man as any in the world.... And all do impute almost wholly to my late temperance, since my making of my vows against wine and play."

Mrs. Darling, who had finished her second glass of ale and felt cheerful, pulled on her woollen gloves and set her ten-and-elevenpenny hat at a more jaunty angle. Men, she declared, were "rovin' by nature," and if a woman wanted to be happy there were "some things she got to shut her eyes to". Half the women who grumbled about their husbands had inheropinion got nobody but themselves to thank for it. The theme is a favourite one of the old lady's, and she continued her discourse as we made our way to Houndsditch—a "melancholy" spot, according to Shakespeare, taking its name from the old city ditch full of dead dogs. A region of small wholesale shops in the drapery line which made no pretentions at setting out the wares to advantage, everything being conducted on strict business principles which left no room for trifling. One came across such announcements as "Grand Order of Israel Friendly Society," and names of such Biblical association as Abraham Lazarus, Isaac Levi, and Simon Solomon. You might by favour purchase a solitary blouse or a dozen of buttons, but it was not with such casual purchasers the little shops wished to trade.

We happened on a gateway over which was inscribed, "Phil's Buildings, Clothes and General Market". A man who had been sitting unnoticed in a pay-box thrust his head out of the little window. "Want anyone in there, sir?" he asked.

"No, I want to see the place."

"Penny, please."

I produced two, and we found ourselves in a yard on each side of which were empty houses, apparently used as warehouses for second-hand clothes. Beyond was a little market-place where men were ranging their goods on long forms under a zinc roof. All round lay huge bundles of wearing apparel—one bundle would contain men's underwear, another trousers, another coats, not to mention piles of old boots, hats, and indiscriminate rubbish.

Through the unglazed windows of the empty houses could be seen a salesman fitting a customer with an overcoat, and a ticket hanging from the window-sill gave the information that paper and string cost 2d.

Mrs. Darling said there might be bargains to be had if the buyer was "in the know," the prices placed upon the garments having no relation to what the seller expected to get (unless "a mug" came along). Bargaining was the very spirit of the place, and a good Jew would feel defraudedof his sport if a customer made no attempt to beat him down.

There was a market every day at two o'clock, the Jew in the pay-box told us, and on being questioned he was quite ready to talk about the slums near. A neighbourhood where you wanted a protector after dark—a person like himself, for instance, who knew every man and woman in the place, and who,for a consideration, would take the gentleman round and show him such things as he had never dreamed of. There was the house which had been raided by the police and three of them shot—he could show the bullet marks in the wall. Then there was Mitre Court, where "Jack the Ripper" had followed on the very heels of the policeman on his beat and murdered a poor creature within ear-shot and almost eye-shot of the man in blue, and never a sound of the horrible outrage to break the silence of the night.

There are other sinister associations connected with the spot, and as I listened I remembered the houses near which were built on one of the plague pits. When the workmen were digging foundations they came upon hundreds of bodies, being able to distinguish the women by their long hair. There was an outcry about the fear of contagion, and the bodies were removed and buried all together in a deep hole dug for thepurpose at the upper end of Rose Alley. I should not like to live in a house built on a plague pit.

GREAT ST. HELEN'S.

"Great St. Helen's" in Bishopgate Street was a pleasant change from the horrors to which we had just been listening. The churchyard was carpeted with dead leaves and the church inside was vague with a coloured dusk. The glowing windows shut out the light, but through one of plain glass the sun entered, making a rainbow bridge high up across the nave towards the Figure of the Good Shepherd on the opposite window.

As we walked round, trying in the semi-darkness to read the inscriptions on the tombs of Sir John Crosby, grocer and woolstapler, who built Crosby Hall; Thomas Gresham, founder of the Royal Exchange; and Julius Cæsar, Privy Counsellor to James I, the sunbeams which had penetrated here and there through cracks and crevices were crossing swords in the gloom of the old building, finding out a crimson cushion, a sculptured face or hands folded in prayer, and lighting, as it were, candles in odd corners.

Not a vestige remains of the old priory of St. Helen's, and the nuns' gratings on the north side, which communicated with the old crypt, have now nothing but darkness to reveal to the curious who peer through them. On the sameside of the church is a walled-up door, and a little circular stone staircase which invites ascent, then confronts the explorer with impenetrable gloom and "no thoroughfare". The old building has lost a limb, and "Finis" is, it seems, writ suddenly in the middle of an exciting chapter.

Mrs. Darling suffers from an infirmity which she describes as "bad feet," so instead of going on to the Charterhouse, as we had intended, we had tea, then home by 'bus.

Mrs. Darling, over her third cup, became expansive, and addressed me as "Old sport". I must certainly give a little time to the study of Cockney slang. I have arrived at the conclusion that it very effectively fills gaps left by the vocabulary of the more cultured and colourless classes.

"Old sport." Not half a bad term. There are moods in which I could apply it to yourself, and occasions on which I really think you might accept it as a compliment.

Yours with the best of intentions,

GEORGE.

CARRINGTONMEWS,

1st November.

DEAR Agatha,—Yes, I am sure you would find the study of Pepys a profitable one. Why not read him to the Mothers' Meeting instead of "The Parent's Friend" or "How to Keep your Husband out of the 'Pub'"? The old chap can be as smug and moral as Sandford and Merton, and his instructiveness is always involuntary.

But to the continuation of the story of my wanderings.

Smithfield, apart from its terrible associations with the Christian martyrs, is not a pleasant place to visit. On every side one is confronted by corpses sewn up in muslin shrouds, whilst ghoulish men in greasy overalls, their hands smeared with blood, superintend the packing of dead flesh into huge vans. A vegetarian could not find a happier spot in which to point the moral of his message. Mrs. Darling said it made her feel as if she could never look a bullock or asheep in the face again, and the mutton chop I had had for lunch haunted my digestion.

It was a relief to leave these horrors for Charterhouse Square, a sad enclosure behind iron railings where the yellow leaves lay thick on the grass and the benches stood empty under the avenue of limes.

The sparrows and starlings were as vociferous as they only can be on a November afternoon when dusk is approaching. Their notes made a volume of soft whistling sound which flowed like a tide in the still, cold air. It followed us through the gateway and into the courtyard, becoming muffled as we went, then giving place to the perfect peace and quiet of the old buildings and their surroundings.

Charterhouse has experienced three phases—first, the Carthusian monastery, then the residence of members of the nobility, lastly, the alms-house for old gentlemen; and it is in this latter capacity that its appeal has always lain for myself, or rather, perhaps, I should say it is the alms-house grafted on that background of ancient history which stirs the imagination.

THE CHARTERHOUSE.

In 1611, at the close of the occupation of the Duke of Norfolk and Lord Thomas Howard, it was bought and endowed as a hospital and school by Mr. Thomas Sutton. The school was removed in 1872, and the number of pensioners("bachelors or widowers over sixty, gentlemen by descent and in poverty") has been reduced from eighty to fifty.

Mrs. Darling, who has a kindly feeling for "old chaps" (witness her good offices to the writer), was very particular in her enquiries as to what was done for the comfort of these particular old gentlemen, and, judged by the answers of the guide, they have a quite enviable time. I shouldn't mind being one myself.

A comfortable bed-sitting-room, with a fire to go to bed by (each pensioner is allowed two tons and a quarter of coal a year), good food, and forty pounds a year pocket money: what more could one want in those later years when desires become fewer with the growing restfulness of old age! Mrs. Darling was of the opinion that the banning of her sex was to be traced to the monkish associations of the place, and considered it a thing to be deprecated. Men, left to themselves, she declared, got "very narrer-minded and dull". They needed a woman to sharpen their wits "jest the same as a cat needs somethink to sharpen 'is claws on".

We went through a paved passage where are the memorial tablets to some of the old school boys since become famous—Thackeray, Wesley, Sir Henry Havelock, Addison, and Steele—and the guide opening a door at the end, we caughta glimpse of stained glass windows and the dark heavy interior of the Jacobean chapel. In the silence we could hear the tick-tock of the chapel clock, that same old clock which seems the familiar spirit of such places.

I suppose, Agatha, the Charterhouse chapel spells to you, as it does to me, Colonel Newcome, and in the raw dusk of the November afternoon I seemed, in the words of Thackeray, to hear "the old reverend blackgowns coughing feebly in the twilight——"

There were candles in those days; now, the guide touches a button and the place is illumined by electric lights—not too many, however—just enough to throw shadows across the aisles and burnish the carvings on the pensioners' seats. As we stared at the founder's tomb, and heard of the customs appertaining to the 12th of December, fiction became merged in fact, and Colonel Newcome grew from out the shadows of the past, a figure as convincing as any of those buried beneath the old flagstones.

"His dear old head was bent down over his prayer-book; there was no mistaking him. He wore the black gown of the pensioners of the Hospital of Grey Friars. His Order of the Bath was on his breast. He stood there amongst the poor brethren, uttering the responses to the psalm. The steps of this good man had been] ordered thither by Heaven's decree: to this alms-house! Here it was ordained that a life all love, and kindness, and honour should end!"

The guide stood back for us to leave, switched off the lights, and closed the door on the vision of those "reverend blackgowns coughing feebly in the twilight". But carrying the remembrance of them with us, we followed him to Norfolk House. The bare boards of the great oak staircase have a well-scrubbed appearance, and everywhere was silence, a dead magnificence, and chill austerity. One can imagine the brothers' rooms, homelike in the cheerful blaze of their fires, but Norfolk House, with its great staircase, its library and tapestry room, its tiny picture gallery and terrace, possesses the tragic aloofness of things which, having survived their uses, remain to be stared at as relics. The guide switched on the lights as he went, and there sprang to view the library with its book-lined walk—old books of Jesuit travel and divinity which are never opened from one year's end to another. In their dim bindings they make a scholarly background for the Chippendale furniture, and the portrait of the man who had bequeathed them to the institution presides wistfully over the neglected feast of letters. From thence into the governor's room, with itspainted Florentine mantelpiece, its faded tapestries, leaden-paned diamond windows, and the arms of the Norfolk family emblazoning the ceiling.

All came to view with the switching on of the lights, then faded into the dusk again at the touch of a button. Our footsteps echoed hollow down the great dim staircase, and we entered the dining-hall, the most ancient of the buildings of pre-Reformation date. Here was the warmth of human contact again: the embers of a fire glowed on the wide hearth under the carved stone chimney piece, and Mrs. Darling said she could smell stewed rabbit and apple tart. She seemed quite pleased with this unofficial testimony to the kind of fare provided for the brothers, and when the guide told her that ale was allowed to all, and whisky to some, her opinion of the administration of the charity went up by leaps and bounds.

Mrs. Darling has no sympathy with the Pussyfoot movement. The late Mr. Darling, it seems, was, like Peggotty's husband, "a little near" when he was sober, and but for his habit of now and again taking too much his wife would never have got a new hat or frock. "Why this very ole plush jacket he bought me the day after 'e'd got drunk and give me a black eye!" she stated triumphantly, "an' it wasn't on'y wot'egiveme neither. It wos wot I used ter pinch when I turned out 'is pockets! I got as much as ten bob at a time, an' he daren't say 'e'd lost anythink, becauseI'd'ave said 'e'd kep' bad company and bin robbed!"

Mrs. Darling has an ironic sense of humour you will observe.

I think, of all the pictures provided by the Charterhouse, the one which gave me the greatest enjoyment was that which met our eyes when the guide opened the door of the "brothers'" library. He had first taken the precaution to see that the room was unoccupied, so I imagine it is not exactly on the list of those parts of the buildings free to the public. The place is a long, low-ceiled apartment (originally the monks' refectory), pillared and wainscotted, with square lozenge-paned windows through which the light of the fading afternoon entered reluctantly. It must, at any time, be a dark room, the outstanding bookcases dividing it into aisles, at the end of which were the dusty old windows.

But in the twilight, with a ruby fire glowing on the hearth, a large crimson Turkey rug before it, and a semi-circle of empty wooden chairs ranged round, it struck a note of comfort and homeliness very welcome after our wanderings through rooms given over to ghosts. Not thatthose same ghosts did not lurk here too. The empty wooden chairs with their stiff, outstretched arms, had a suggestion of waiting for a company other than the black-robed pensioners who, apparently, were fonder of their own bed-sitting-rooms than this ancient apartment with its monkish associations.

But the guide was waiting for us: there is no time allowed for dreaming in these places. One must do that afterwards at home, and I sometimes think, Agatha, that more even than my enjoyment in the actual visits to these old scenes, is the pleasure of talking to you about them in these letters.

A solitary gas lamp was flickering here and there in the cloisters when we came outside, and we found the sparrows and starlings still continuing their concert with indefatigable energy. As they flew round and round the trees it was difficult to distinguish between birds and falling leaves. The dusk was peopled with both.

The proximity to St. Bartholomew's suggested a visit, and we walked a few yards down Aldersgate Street and from thence into Cloth Fair. Of the original Cloth Fair there is very little left now. On every side you see empty spaces where, not many years ago, had been tortuous streets and courts of ancient houses that must have witnessed the reign of many a king andqueen—houses that stood there long before the Christian martyrs were burnt at Smithfield, and first plague, then fire, ravaged the city. Could they have told their terrible secrets those ancient dwellings might have recounted stories as terrorising as the most blood-curdling of nightmares.

A BIT OF OLD SMITHFIELD.

Of the particular row of houses which had always appealed to me by reason of their contiguity to the churchyard, part of one only remains. Many a time have I stood and stared at the dingy backs of those unwholesome dwellings, wondering what it must feel like to live in a room with a discoloured tombstone peeping in at the window. Familiarity, one imagines, would breed contempt, but there would be times during sleepless nights, or in some hour of depression, when the horrid nearness of that sooty churchyard, with its mouldering bodies under the rank grass and refuse, would foster the evil imaginations of madness.

However, the houses, and many of their like, have gone now, and Cloth Fair and Little Britain, with the exception of little bits here and there such as in East Passage, make space for business premises and warehouses. In the midst of it all stands St. Bartholomew the Great, a thing of mutilated limbs—witness the scars on portions of its walls where its members have beendissevered, and where in their place mundane buildings have crowded up to within a few yards of it. Yet there it stands, in dignified aloofness from the intrusive neighbours who nudge its elbows with irreverent and familiar touch. They may rub shoulders with it at every point, but between them and it is no more intimacy than there is between Rahere, its founder, and the sight-seer who, gazing at his tomb, learns the story of his conversion from jester to monk. The strange story of a vision of St. Bartholomew, in which the Saint, with a practical regard to detail, ordered Rahere to build a church in Smithfield, a behest the noble fulfilment of which is made evident in the old walls that have weathered so many centuries, and the Hospital next door.

St. Bartholomew's is one of those buildings which has, like some people, to be known to be loved. At first one is almost repelled by its austere and dignified beauty. It is unapproachable with the unapproachableness of the great. It is dim, too, with the pathetic dimness of a lonely old age, and one's sense of reverence is violated when one learns that the Lady Chapel was at one time tenanted by a fringe manufacturer, and the north transept used as a blacksmith's forge.

But the age of vandalism is past, and withinthe old walls law and order are restored. The ring of the blacksmith's hammer has given place to the solemn notes of the organ, the blaze of the forge fire to the soft light of altar candles. The fret and hurry of life no more cross the threshold, and you can meditate undisturbed.

Mrs. Darling was obviously bored. Historical details and dates leave her cold. She does not belong to the class of sight-seers who, hungry for information, follow sheep-like in the wake of the guide. She wanders off on her own and has a curious faculty for seizing on some unimportant detail which makes a personal appeal to her. Charterhouse will always mean for her the figure of one of the old pensioners we saw in the cloisters. A funny old chap in a large slouch felt hat, a dirty trench coat, and with his trousers sagging about his ankles—that and the smell of stewed rabbit and apple tart, together with rumours of nips of whisky and glasses of ale, will stand out in her memory from an undigested mass of "dry" facts and a background of empty echoing rooms and old grey walls, which latter, as she expressed it, "give her the pip". The history of The Priory of St. Bartholomew made her tired, and I suggested an adjournment.

As we passed St. Bartholomew's Hospital I pointed out to her the brass plate in the wall on which was inscribed the names of some who,within a few feet of the spot, had suffered for their faith at the stake in 1556-1557. Smithfield will always be a place of shuddering associations, and even the prosaic market front and the cold-storage premises, with their rows of lighted windows starring the blue dusk, seemed in some strange fashion implicated in its awful memories. As late as March, 1849, when excavations were being made for a new sewer, there were discovered, three feet below the surface, immediately opposite the entrance to the church, charred human bones and the remains of some oak posts partially consumed by fire. From whence did the courage of those heroic citizens of old come? Life has no greater mystery than the undaunted spirit with which they faced the hellish tortures of fire and the rack.

At the top of Giltspur Street I paused with a sudden recollection of having heard that there still existed the quaint statue of the Fat Boy who used to stand at Pie Corner, where the Great Fire ceased. The incident appealed to Mrs. Darling's curious faculty for selection. She said she would like to see that fat boy, and we promptly went in search of him.

There were no signs of Pie Corner, the spot where it should have been being occupied by the shop of a foot specialist. It was Mrs. Darling who discovered the Fat Boy standingin a little brick alcove, over the door, which had apparently been made for his reception.

He was not a model of symmetry or beauty, but Mrs. Darling promptly annexed him as she had annexed the old pensioner of the sagging trousers and slouched hat, and somewhere in the lumber-room of the old lady's memory the Fat Boy took his place with Charles II, the aforesaid old pensioner, and Samuel Pepys, to whom she invariably refers as "that saucy ole man with the curls".

The fact that the Great Fire broke out at the king's baker's in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner struck her as something more than a coincidence. It was all very well for people to talk about "chance,"shedidn't believe in chance. The very fact of the coincidence of names suggested, tohermind, a well-thought-out plan. She would have sympathised with the Rev. Samuel Vincent, who, writing at the time, said, "This doth smell of a Popish design, hatcht in the same place where the Gunpowder Plot was contrived".

By the way, I never think of the Great Fire without remembering the description of an eyewitness of the burning of Guild Hall: "And amongst other things that night, the sight of Guildhall was a fearful spectacle, which stood, the whole body of it together, in view for severalhours together, after the fire had taken it, without flames (I suppose because the timber was such solid oak), like a bright shining coal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass". You won't beat that for a bit of word painting.

We walked on through the Old Bailey and into Fleet Street, where Shoe Lane reminded me of the fact that the man who was responsible for the phrase, "Before you could say Jack Robinson," was a tobacconist named Herdom, who lived at 98 Shoe Lane some hundred years ago.

The following verse is ascribed to him:—

Says the lady, says she, "I've changed my state.""Why, you don't mean," says Jack, "that you've got a mate?You know you promised me". Says she, "I couldn't wait,For no tidings could I gain of you, Jack Robinson,And somebody one day came to me and saidThat somebody else had somewhere read,In some newspaper, that you were somewhere dead"."I've not been dead at all," says Jack Robinson,

the pathetic naïveté of which statement marks the simple sailorman.

Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet, who lives in the lines—

I could not love thee, dear, so much,Lov'd I not honour more,

together with—

Stone walls do not a prison make,Nor iron bars a cage,

died in Gunpowder Alley, Shoe Lane, and I wondered whether the Alley still existed under that name.

It did not take many minutes to find out. Yes, there it was, just at the top on the left-hand side, but no trace of poor Lovelace—nothing but new offices, one or two dingy little shops, and the patient thump, thump, of printing presses.

We went by way of New Street through Nevill's Court, where, behind an old wall and sooty front gardens, stand a row of ancient red brick houses. I like to go through Nevill's Court on one of those mild days in February when Spring lurks behind the grey stillness and there are buds on the lilac bush which looks over the top of that same old wall. The little greengrocer's at the end, too, always strikes a welcome note of colour with its flaming oranges and rosy-cheeked apples.

Nevill's Court leads to Fetter Lane, which Mrs. D. at once associated with Newgate. In order to mitigate her disappointment on hearing that "Fetter" was a corruption of Fewterers (otherwise the beggars and disorderly persons who used to frequent the place), I told her thestory of Elizabeth Brownrigge, the celebrated murderess who was executed at Tyburn, September 14th, 1767, for beating her apprentice to death. The house where the infamous deed was done was in Fetter Lane, looking into Fleur-de-lys Court, and the cellar in which the child was confined, together with the iron grating through which her cries were heard, used, according to a London historian, to be shown. After the execution, the corpse was put into a hackney coach and taken to Surgeons' Hall for dissection, and somewhere in a London collection the skeleton is still preserved. A hoarding covered with advertisements stood on the spot, marking the demolition of some old premises. Mrs. Darling, however, must needs explore Fleur-de-lys Court, and we discovered an old shut-up house with a cellar grating, which Mrs. Darling was quite satisfied was the scene of the sinister crime. So pleasantly excited was she that she forgot her bad feet and walked on with a swing down Fetter Lane, past "The Record" Office and the entrance to the Moravian Chapel, that drab little building where Baxter preached in 1672 and Wesley and Whitfield thundered of the wrath to come, giving sinners bad nights, and cheating the devil of his due.

I did not remind Mrs. Darling of these things. She was, I knew, looking forward to tea andtoasted scones, over which she would demand a fuller account of the murder committed by Elizabeth Brownrigge, and speculate on how the Charterhouse pensioners spent their pocket-money, and what would happen if they fell in love.

I pass on the solution of the second of these conundrums to you, and remain,

Your old friend,

GEORGE.

CARRINGTONMEWS,

13th November.

DEAR Agatha,—I quite agree with you that it isn't altogether a kind thing to drag these poor old ghosts out of their hiding-places and talk scandal about them. One pictures them blinking their dust-dimmed eyes in the strong light of to-day and resenting the conduct of Paul Prys like myself. But one must take the bad with the good, and if with stories of heroism, human kindness, and tenderness one unearths a good deal that is unworthy, one cannot do better than adopt Mrs. Darling's attitude.Sheis neither depressed nor demoralised by learning of the frailties and passions of those who have had their little day, and, going out into the great unknown, become creatures of Romance and Mystery. That may be because death has not invested them, forher, with any dignity which can suffer from these familiarities, and her charity, always large for the living, is just as large, and no larger, for the dead. Mrs. Darling is a philosopher,and finds in the human comedy her entertainment. She is also, by the way, an optimist of the first water. "Never say die till yer shin-bone cuts the blanket," is her advice when there's a yellow fog and one has a cold in one's head.

This afternoon the old lady and I have been playing a sort of game of hide and seek in the courts and alleys on the northern side of Fleet Street. Our ambition was to find Dr. Johnson's house in Gough Square, always an elusive object, I had been told by those who had been there, and I, unfortunately, was born without the bump of locality. This afternoon the strange fact that man, left to himself, travels in a circle, found startling corroboration. For one solid half-hour the pair of us revolved round the Doctor's abode, sometimes within a few yards of it, without finding it. As you may remember, I would always rather lose a train than question a porter, and I have the same dislike for confessing the ignorance of my whereabouts to strangers. Besides, I want to cure myself of this ridiculous habit of rotating. Mrs. Darling, to whom I explained the situation, had solutions to offer. Was it, she said, that man wasnot meantto extend his travels, or was it because the world was round? Meanwhile it certainly seemed that Providence didn't intend us to find No. 17 Gough Square.I blush to tell you, Agatha, that I stared into its side windows without recognising it, and that I passed entrances to Gough Square from three points of the compass without being aware of them, but that may have been because I was mentally employed in sorting out suitable anecdotes about the Doctor for Mrs. Darling's entertainment when once we reached our goal.

A little public-house called "The Red Lion," squeezed into a corner of Red Lion Court (a most unsuitable spot, one would have thought, for a "pub"), exercised an unholy attraction for us. Three times did we make it our starting point, and three times did we come back to it with feelings of surprise at finding an old friend from whom we thought we had parted for good. I hope it isn't necessary to addthat we hadn't been inside. Getting clear of "The Red Lion" at last, we got entangled with Bolt Court, Hind Court, and Wine-office Court on the other side, only escaping their labyrinthine twists and turns to get mixed up in Shoe Lane, East Harding Street, and Goldsmith's Street. At last we emerged into Fleet Street once more to take breath and Mrs. Darling triumphantly pointed to "Johnson's Court," which, by the way, has no connection with the Doctor. I had no faith in the promise held out by the august name, but in desperation I turned into it. This time, however,it was impossible to go astray, because once inside Johnson's Court we had no choice but to follow our noses. Up the court, across a paved square, through a narrow passage, along by the backs of some houses, round an abrupt turn to the left, and behold one was in Gough Square, and the object of one's pilgrimage come into being, as it were, by magic. In fact, so suddenly and unexpectedly did it break on us that the wonder is we didn't pass it unnoticed and forge straight ahead again for "The Red Lion".

DR. JOHNSON'S HOUSE IN GOUGH SQUARE.

Mrs. Darling claimed acquaintance with the Doctor by virtue of an old copy of the Dictionary which she told me she found lying on the kerb near a bookstall in Farringdon Road. I suggested that she should have made enquiries of the owner of the stall as to whether the book was his. But she said that seeing she had at different times lost a watch which didn't go, a purse containing two and sevenpence three farthings, a flat iron, and a set of artificial teeth belonging to an old friend who died, she thought it was time shefoundsomething.

There was a poetic sort of justice about this reasoning which I was loth to question, and I evaded the issue by directing the old lady's attention to the tablet on the wall of the house, which informs passers-by that Dr. Johnson lived there from 1748 to 1758.

She answered, "Well, I never," and in her turn drew my attention to the fact that someone had opened the door and was waiting for us to enter.

Mrs. Darling followed at my heels with an apologetic clearing of her throat. I think she anticipated being introduced to some alarming social function. This was not a museum nor a church. This was a house with curtains at the windows, pictures on the walls, and even flowers in vases, and Mrs. Darling had never heard of the idea of turning a house into a shrine. I pointed out to her the portrait of the author of the Dictionary, and she gave it as her opinion that he was trustworthy but of a bilious disposition.

There were no other visitors, at the moment, and we wandered unmolested from room to room, finding everywhere a strange silence set in the monotonous hum and clack of the printing presses outside—a sound which fills the neighbouring courts and alleys with a ceaseless thump, thump, as of the labouring heart of this backwater of Fleet Street.

Mrs. Darling stared out of the windows and took an occasional rest in one of the stiff rush-bottomed chairs, whilst I peered into the glass cases containing yellow letters inscribed with faded brown characters, thinking how surprised the writers would have been could they haveforeseen this day, nearly two hundred years ahead, when some chance note, scribbled on the spur of the moment, was read by the curious eyes of strangers, eager to put an eye to any hole in the curtain of the past.

The portraits, too, were eloquent. Boswell of the long ears, who did for Johnson what Pepys did for himself. "Bozzy," who saw with the terrible eyes of a child, and who, without any apparent realisation that each word was a stroke of the chisel, patiently hewed his living portrait of Dr. Johnson for posterity. I do not agree with the implications of toadyism against "Bozzy". There was real humility in his attitude towards the great man, and real love for the object of his hero worship.

To myself, the history of "Bozzy's" patience under rebuff, his elation at small victories, his hopes and fears, and the minuteness with which he chronicles every detail of his intercourse with the object of his adoration, is more thrilling than many a romance of the love of man for woman.

There was Garrick, too, of whom Goldsmith wrote, "He cast off his friends as a huntsman his pack, for he knew when he pleased he could whistle them back". Johnson, speaking of the actor's great wealth and popularity, said, "If all this had happened to me I should have hada couple of fellows with long poles walking before me, to knock down everybody that stood in the way.... Yet Garrick speaks tous.... A liberal man. He has given away more money than any man in England." To which Boswell replies, "Yet Foote used to say of him that he walked out with an intention to do a generous action, but, turning the corner of a street, he met the ghost of a halfpenny, which frightened him". I've been reading "Bozzy," you will see, and having my faith in the colossal inconsistency of human nature strongly confirmed.

The vivacious Mrs. Thrale, whom Macaulay describes as "one of those clever, kind-hearted, engaging, vain, pert young women who are perpetually saying or doing something that is not exactly right; but who, do or say what they may, are always agreeable," wears a hat which lends her an appearance of false solemnity. She has, though, an air of elegance which makes it easy to believe that she was the lady "for whom" the Doctor "bought silver buckles and new wigs, and by associating with whom, his external appearance was much improved".

There also was Goldsmith, with his ugly, bulging forehead, his protruding, obstinate mouth and apprehensive eyes, the eyes of a man who anticipates adverse criticism. Tohimthe Doctor accorded a protective tenderness themore notable that, whilst recognising the genius of his protégé, Johnson could have but ill understood poor Goldy's self-consciousness and foolish little weaknesses.

The poet himself had a lively appreciation of this trait of chivalry in the Doctor. Witness his words when speaking of a ne'er-do-well of his acquaintance: "He is now become miserable," says Goldsmith, "and that insures the protection of Johnson".

Mrs. Darling was curious to know whether the Doctor had a wife, and I told her the strange story of his wooing and winning a lady twice his age—not a beauty, according to Garrick, who described her as "very fat, with a bosom of more than ordinary protuberance, with swelled cheeks, of a florid red, produced by thick painting, and increased by the liberal use of cordials; flaring and fantastic in her dress, and affected both in her speech and her general behaviour". Boswell's remark apropos of the situation is very naïve. Says "Bozzy" in his most pompous style, referring to the Doctor and his wife, "He had a high opinion of her understanding, and the impressions which her beauty, real or imaginary, had originally made upon his fancy, being continued by habit, had not been effaced, though she herself was doubtless much altered for the worse". What a touching view this gives ofthe learned Doctor's simplicity of heart! Mrs. Darling, on whom even such an ancient piece of gossip as this had a cheering effect, remarked that the Doctor wasn't everybody's money. For her part she wouldn't have taken him "if 'is 'air 'ad 'ung with dimonds". Not that she doubted the excellence of his character, but, well—and really, Agatha, you must forgive me if I appear vain in repeating the incident. "Give me a man," said Mrs. Darling solemnly, with an unmistakable glance of admiration inmydirection—"Give me a man that keeps 'imselfcleanand 'olds 'imself stright, even if 'e does put a bit of glass in 'is eye and pretend 'e can see through it." Mrs. Darling, by the way, never misses an occasion for airing her disapproval of my monocle.

We climbed the winding staircase and stood in the garret where the dictionary had been written, a long, low-ceiled room with small curtained windows, one end of which was chill with the approach of dusk, whilst the other was warmed by slant beams of a red sun shining amongst the crowding chimney-pots and telephone wires. I pictured on some such afternoon Johnson's six amanuenses busy at their part in the great work, and wondered whether they knocked off at dusk.

The Doctor, in his rusty brown suit and his"little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up and his unbuckled shoes," would probably be busy with them. Perhaps he would be, as Boswell once found him, "covered with dust and buffeting his books," whilst Mrs. Hannah Williams in the room downstairs waited at the tea table. Presently the Doctor would go down and they would drink tea by the light of the fire. What would they talk about? Boswell describes the blind lady as "a woman of more than ordinary talents and literature," and the two might have discussed some contribution Johnson had in his mind for "The Literary Magazine"—"A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil," perhaps, or his "Essay on Tea".

"I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than Johnson," says Boswell, and as Mrs. Darling shares with myself the Doctor's weakness, I proposed an adjournment to Temple Tea Rooms—if we could extricate ourselves from the maze surrounding Gough Square.

And so we left the tall, flat-fronted, eighteenth-century house as the lights were coming out in the offices all round. At the printers' windows compositors were busy setting up type, and the printing machines had no peace from their treadmill labour. But no sound issued from Number 17,and no face appeared at any one of the long narrow windows.

"Even if you 'adn't told me, sir, I should 'ave known that wos a empty house," announced Mrs. Darling, as she stared meditatively at the Queen Anne front, and the roof line against the reddening sky.

"Why?" I enquired.

"Oh, I dunno 'ow I know, but Idoknow." Mrs. Darling begins, you will see, to display signs of imagination. It would not surprise me to learn that she belongs to the class of "mute inglorious" Miltons. Hers may be:—

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