E who loves to loiter about London with an

eye to the picturesque seldom goes on one of his pilgrimages without missing some old familiar landmark. It has vanished as surely as the Djinn's Palace, and in its place are ugly cranes, mounds of brandnew bricks, piles of girders, and a bristling framework of masts, amongst which an army of men is at work busily raising up some new edifice more suitable to the age we live in. Or it may be that the space has gone to widen some crooked thoroughfare too long choked by traffic. Such a fate, for example, has just befallen Lower Thames Street, which I happened to visit one holiday morning in the company of an artist, whilst making a little tour of the historic ground about the Monument. We were both much surprised, but London is so vast that many upheavals may be in progress which quite escape the public eye. Ancient houses that had stood on the river bank for centuries lay in ruins; of the famous Mermaid Tavern, which once, they say, used to echo with the jokes of Falstaff, only the bar and its beertaps remained, a thing like a shanty of the back blocks: to retain its license it was still an open house, and in more senses than one; open to the thirsty, open also to the winds of heaven, torn up as though by the socket, a heap of bricks and mortar, throwing up clouds of dust like a volcano in the throes.

It was about eleven o'clock, and the narrow roadway was still crowded with those who traffic in fish: dealers, clerks, and porters, the last wearing those quaint articles like horse-collars, which they place on their heads to ease their loads. The air reeked of fish, and though the sun was shining fiercely the street was ankledeep in slime and slush, yet spangled with iridescent scales which flashed and glittered out of the obscene. Trucks and barrows were flying hither and thither, heavy carts and other vehicles continually passed to and fro, and it was with difficulty that we could either stand still or make any progress without danger to life and limb. No one could pass this way without understanding that fish was the only thing

which mattered here, for we saw barrels of them, warehouses full of them, and each sign informed you that every fish swimming in the ocean deeps was dealt with. In dark and devious passages, which seemed to lead nowhere, tired fish-porters were sleeping or eating, regardless of the smells, the slime, the eternal din, grateful only for mother earth, be it never so stony, and the cool dark shade. They sat

on the roadside, hung in groups about lamp-posts, before public-houses, including the Mermaid bar, lounged against the rails of churches-for, as we shall see, there are churches even here-smoking, yawning, gossiping, wrapt in reflection-a rough set of men indeed, such as hard physical labour produces; men whose night is day, whose day is apparently night or rest-hour; river-dogs and watermen, who help to handle boats and barges; men in whose skin the river ooze has entered never to leave again; amphibious creatures peculiar to Billingsgate,-and yet though that name is a byword all the world over for strange oaths, not one caught my ears. Perhaps they were lost in the deafening din, swept away in the screech of wheels, playing maddening Wagnerian strains on the stone-setts to join the general roar of London, the awful hum as of the revolutions of a giant mill-wheel. mill-wheel. Or have we English lost all our originality, eclipsed by America?

Who would expect the picturesque in such a place? who the antiquities, ancient history and associations?

Yet the ground is historic, for only a few yards away is Pudding Lane, in which the Fire of London first began to burn. Here, in a dark little court which branches out of it on the left, is the site of the very baker's shop, for all times memorable. It is still a baker's shop, and the baker's cart was, at the very moment of my visit, waiting at the door for its load.

The baker of the Restoration was one Farryner, who was bread-maker to the King, and probably some overheated oven set the Great Fire going on that fateful night in September of 1666. In those days Pudding Lane was even narrower