The Lure of Old London

Nove

Mothers' Meeting instead of "The Parent's Friend" or "How to Keep your Husband out of the 'Pub'"? The

ation of the story

st 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 th

ad enclosure behind iron railings where the yellow leaves lay thick

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 c

astly, the alms-house for old gentlemen; and it is in this latter capacity that its appeal has always lain for myself, or r

HARTE

d as a hospital and school by Mr. Thomas Sutton. The school was removed in 1872, and the number of pensioners (

y particular in her enquiries as to what was done for the comfort of these particular old gentlemen, and

ater 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

lock, Addison, and Steele-and the guide opening a door at the end, we caught a glimpse of stained glass windows and the dark heavy interior of the

l Newcome, and in the raw dusk of the November afternoon I seemed, in the words of

cross 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 Decembe

riars. 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

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 f

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 pl

ch 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 'e gi

ironic sense of humo

hat 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 s

ness very welcome after our wanderings through rooms given over to ghosts. Not that those same ghosts did not lurk here too. The empty wooden chairs with their stiff, outstretched arms, had a

do that afterwards at home, and I sometimes think, Agatha, that more even than my enjoyment in the

parrows and starlings still continuing their concert with indefatigable energy. As they flew round and roun

pty 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 and queen-houses that stood there long before the Christian martyrs were bu

OLD SMI

holesome 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

severed, 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-

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 reve

smith's hammer has given place to the solemn notes of the organ, the blaze of the forge fire to the soft lig

nal 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

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, immediatel

statue of the Fat Boy who used to stand at Pie Corner, where the Great Fire ceased. The incident appealed to Mrs. Darl

the shop of a foot specialist. It was Mrs. Darling who discovered the Fat Boy standing i

agging trousers and slouched hat, and somewhere in the lumber-room of the old lady's memory the Fat Boy took his place with C

or people to talk about "chance," she didn't believe in chance. The very fact of the coincidence of names suggested, to her mind, a well-thought-out plan. She would have sy

ildhall was a fearful spectacle, which stood, the whole body of it together, in view for several hours together, after the fire had taken it, without flames (I suppose because the

the fact that the man who was responsible for the phrase, "Before you could say Jack Rob

verse is asc

ays she, "I've c

n," says Jack, "tha

sed me". Says she,

ould I gain of y

one day came

y else had s

r, that you were

ead at all," say

f which statement mark

e Cavalier poet, who

love thee, d

not hono

ther

do not a p

n bars

e, and I wondered whether the All

n the left-hand side, but no trace of poor Lovelace-nothing but new offices, o

hrough 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 t

-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 F

over which she would demand a fuller account of the murder committed by Elizabeth Brownrigge, and specula

the second of these conu

old f

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