barons who were wont to gather round it in the days of chivalry,

and there

"Drink the red wine thro' the helmet barred."

Each one had a space sufficiently large for his goblet of grapejuice and flagon of bright Burgundy, and many a loud laugh and piquant jest has circulated round that famous board in the days of old when the luscious beverage was at work in the brains of the warriors there assembled. It looks as if designed for wassail and revelry, and right well do they who preserve it in iron bands as it now is.

In my rambles about the city, I noticed the condition of the lower order of people, but as it varies but little from that of the same class in any of the other southern cities, there is but little worth recording here. While sitting in the coffee-room of my inn, I entered into conversation with a workingman, who readily communicated such information respecting the city as I desired. He possessed a strong intellect, good conversational powers, and a friendly spirit. Wherever I met with intelligent workingmen in England, and there are many such, I always found liberal sentiments and kindly treatment, and a knowledge of history and politics truly astonishing, when it is considered that such knowledge was acquired by hard study after a long day's labor. Such are the thinking men of England, and their numbers are daily increasing with their stock of knowledge, and if they continue to increase throughout the country for the next ten years, as fast as they have done in the ten just past, they will, ere long, seal the fate of royalty in the realm of Great Britain, and sweep into the vortex of the past every kingly claim. They think they reason -they act; and, however much they may be sneered at and contemned, ridiculed, vilified, and abused, they still press on in the path of justice and popular rights, unmindful of the titled drones who suck their life's blood, and yet laugh them to scorn; and are sowing the seeds now of a revolution which must eventually tell with terrible force against the aristocracy of the country, and fix its doom. They are not very numerous comparatively, but they are not idlers, and act with a firm conviction of being the soldiers of a righteous cause, and neither falter nor halt in their manly course. What they sow takes root, and the fruits of their labor will be felt and seen among the young of their class of the rising generation. Kingcraft is sealed in England, and these men are silently, noiselessly, slowly, but surely, working out the truth, and will develop it to the world in its own proper time. It will be a bloodless revolution-a revolution of mind over exploded theories -of intelligence and justice over tyranny, hypocrisy, and wrong -of the too long downtrodden and spurned many over the legalized, aristocratic, supercilious, and arrogant few.

CHAPTER XXXVI.

RETURN TO LONDON-RAMBLES-OLD PLACES-FALLEN WOMEN.

FROM Winchester to the metropolis I met with but little of note, and as the route lay over a country both level and uninteresting there was nothing worthy of particular attention. When I arrived at the Waterloo station, on the Surrey side of the Thames, things were different from what they were during the continuance of the Exhibition. The trains were less crowded, the cabs more idle, and the landing less thronged than when I last visited the place. Then foreigners with mustaches crowded the approaches, and one's ears were saluted by a confusion of tongues, strange and incomprehensible. Frenchmen, Belgians, Germans, and Spaniards were there preparing for their return to the Continent, and busy porters and interpreters were directing the strangers to the carriages which were to convey them away. Now there were none but natives present, and they were cold and reserved in manner. I escaped from the mass that emerged from the cars and filled the platform, and gained the open street as soon as circumstances would permit. The streets were not thronged with pedestrians, as in the zenith of the Exhibition enthusiasm, and the omnibus proprietors had relaxed their ava

sum.

riciousness by reducing the fares from sixpence to one-half that Seven weeks had worked wonders in the great city, but no great change in my friendly landlord, for, when I knocked at his door, I was welcomed with unfeigned delight by himself and family, and felt that I was really at home. It was a sincere outpouring of true, honest friendship, that cordial greeting, and such a one as comes with joy to the heart of a stranger in a foreign land.

The man who has a penchant for the old and remarkable finds sufficient to occupy his time and attention when in London. There is abundant to admire, and much to record.

I amused myself in various ways when strolling about the city; but my greatest gratification was derived from visiting such places as are celebrated by their connection with the famous men and remarkable events of the olden time. I hunted out the " Devil Tavern" and the "Grecian;" but there is not a feature of their ancient glory remaining. The people who resort to them are clothed in the habit of our day, and you look in vain for the strange costume of the time of Queen Anne. At night, these houses appear more sacred than during the day, for it was at night that they were fullest of company in their days of glory, and it is then that they are most crowded now.

The vicinity of Temple Bar, and thence up the Strand, was a favorite resort; but I sometimes varied my walk and rambled into the eastern part of the city, as far as Tower Hill and the Docks. St. Dunstan's Church, in the east, has often attracted me; and not only its strange steeple, but its architectural beauties repaid me for my trouble. The old houses on the narrow, crooked, and steep streets, and the busy, maritime, mercantile-looking people thereabout during the day, have so much of the air of the past about them that I took more pleasure in visiting them than any other objects in London, because the inhabitants are more in character with the buildings they inhabit than the dwellers in Cheapside and Fleet Street are with those renowned sections. Tower Hill detained me frequently, and I looked over it with strange feelings, on to the prisons of many whose names are household words in America-Lady Jane Grey's, Anne Boleyn's, and Sir Thomas More's. Then there is Trinity House, and the birthplace of William Penn, for he was born on Tower Hill. I sometimes stood there alone in a reflecting mood, and, regardless of the showman who exhibited his learned birds and quadrupeds, called to mind the scenes witnessed on that spot in other days, when crowds gathered there to look upon such as were brought forth to die. The grass grows green in the once fetid moat, and flowers bloom on the place that soaked the gore of the too often innocent who suffered there; but the earth is the same now as when executions were common on the spot, although time and policies are changed, and my fancy often pictured before me the assembled crowd waiting to witness a fellow-being die. That is the place of death, and the one who is familiar with the history of the Tower cannot help calling to mind the scenes of the past when standing near it. In front is the White Tower, with its solid Norman arches and impenetrable walls, and beyond that the crime-begrimed Bloody Tower, in which the prince sons of Edward the Fourth were murdered by their uncle's hired assassins; and nearer, the Bowyer Tower, where tradition says Clarence was drowned in a butt of malmsey. Men in the soldier-dress of the days of Henry the Seventh, big, burly, beef-eating Britons, stand within the archway by which you enter the gloomy prison; and sentinels pace to and fro before the ponderous gates. The building and its towers, its walls and battlements, its cells and apartments, are, with but few exceptions, the same as when men were chained therein for real or fancied crimes; and, as I gazed upon the Hill and the Tower of London, the names of those who there suffered death flashed across my mind. The place of execution is visible from the outer side of the walls, and I often stood where Margaret of Shrewsbury, Surrey the poet, Lord Dudley, the Earl of Stafford, Archbishop Laud, young Harry Vane, and Howard, Earl of Strafford, yielded up their lives in extenuation of real or imputed crimes. Years have gone by since the last execution took place on Tower Hill; but the murders perpetrated there can never be obliterated from the pages of history, nor will the impression of the spot made upon the minds of youthful readers by the chronicler ever be forgotten.

As the stranger stands and looks riverwards from the eminence, his eye meets the crowded Thames and the various craft which traverse its bosom; and the mind is led into reflections on the past, suggested by different associations from those connected with the walls of the tower and the places of execution. Large steamships navigate the sinuous river, and countless shipping blacken its waters, and with their tall masts almost shut out from sight the opposite shore. How different is the Thames at London now from what it was when the keels of the Roman galleys divided its waters, and the fleets of the conquerer covered its surface! And how altered from what it was two hundred years ago, when hosts of wherries and watermen moved upon its bosom, and but one wretched, rickety bridge spanned its waters! The glory of the abusive boatman has departed, and his calling is almost unknown at this day in the very locality where, less than a century ago, it was deemed indispensable and considered imperishable. Now, steam usurps the stream and business of the once useful wherry; and foot-passengers cross and recross from shore to shore of the Thames, both over and under its waters, without molestation, at all hours, day and night, and almost without charge. The river streets of the eastern section of the metropolis are narrow, muddy or dusty, and thronged. They partake, more or less, of the character of the streets nearest the rivers in other cities, so far as business is concerned, and the people who inhabit them; but the houses are old, the footways narrow, and the general appearance gloomy. The men you encounter there are bent on trade, and the heavy vans and ponderous carts which roll lazily through those avenues, lumbered up with merchandise, convey to the mind of the beholder an idea of the peculiar business transacted there. I was rather fond of sauntering through them, and my face became known in one or two coffee-houses in Lower Thames Street, but more particularly in that one called Czar's Head, celebrated for having been the place to which Peter the Great was accustomed to retire after finishing his day's labor in the shipyard where he wrought as a journeyman when in London.

Below the Tower, the streets are generally badly built, and the abodes of wretched poor. Rose-Mary Lane, in that quarter, was