swans as they sailed by the solitude of the dead
town between the ruins of the bridge and under
the great trees. That did not last long, for
your live man is an active fellow. The living
are the quick and bustling. Men soon swarmed
again within the thick old stone walls ribbed with
tile, and poured in and out of the town gates,
like ants in and out of their ant-holes.

I cannot help it if I mix together many
recollections of that town of yours. I had a little
daughter buried in our cemetery of Londinium,
under the trees outside the walls, somewhere
below your great cathedral of St. Paul's. She is
now one of the belles of Ghoston; but I often
visit the old burial-place, haunting the crypt and
vaults of your cathedral, because they are a little
nearer to the level of the ground we used to
tread a thousand and half a thousand years ago.

Since then, I have seen baby London short-
coated, and frocked, and breeched, and jacketed,
and bloused, and long-tail-coated. What a
muddy, thatched hive—all rushes, and straw,
and wood, and ashlar work—there was within
the walls, after our Roman time, when the plume
of a mounted knight careering in the narrow
street, streamed higher than the smoke of the
street chimneys! Chimneys? They had no
chimneys. And what a plague the town was, soon
after its babyhood, for setting fire to itself!
Every house, I remember, had its bucket of
water ready in case fire broke out, and every
ward had its iron crook, its rope, and its
two chains, wherewith to drag away from its
neighbour any house that might catch fire. Once
it pleased the good people, in their dark streets,
to make light of the government that ordered
every man to hang a lantern out at dusk. They
hung out their lanterns as the law ordained,
putting no candle inside, because the law had
ordained nothing about candle. But, ah me!
what a light there was one day, when Nero
fetched us up, to see flames two miles long and
one mile broad and smoke spreading fifty miles, as
the fire, starting from Pudding-lane, ran to Pye-
corner!

Hadrian, down in our place, the other day,
advised me to run up to London as it is, and
talk of London as it was: offering me his
card of introduction to a Mr. Thomas Wright,
upon whom it would be worth my while to call,
as he would be able to talk with me
pleasantly about old times. Hadrian, also, has
shown to me, in his own rooms, a presentation
copy of some Illustrations of Roman London,
which Mr. Charles Roach Smith, a man well
known to us in the Roman set at Ghoston,
has just printed for subscribers. On the
frontispiece it amused me to see a picture of the
bronze head of my friend Hadrian himself,
from the great statue of him which used to
stand in the old Roman town. They had fished
up his head out of the Thames, where penny
steam-boats, perhaps, run over his legs and
body. Now, I can by no means satisfy myself
that you understand why you are informed that
between one and two thousand years ago I ate
oysters at Rutupiæ, and, having been ferried
across the oyster-beds, rode on horseback from
that stronghold, with its villas and its marble
temples, and its amphitheatre, galloping along a
famous road over the Downs to Durovernum.
If, however, there be a ghost of a reason for
my disclosures, possibly it will appear. From
that important town of Durovernum, known to
the world now as Canterbury, roads branched
coastward; but the road I took, was to the
north-east, over the high grounds of the forest
of Blee, by way of Durobrivæ on the Madus,
which you now call Rochester on the Medway,
and by the numerous Roman settlements on the
bank of the Thames, from your present Southfleet
onwards; then, across Shooter's Hill, over
Blackheath, through our town of Noviomagus,
till I came to the streets and villas of our
suburb of London south of the Thames, in your
present region of Southwark.

That was not the road taken by Suetonius
when, in the time of Nero, your books tell for
the first time of London as the place to which
that governor of the Britons meant to confine
his struggle with the natives. Not far from
Aldersgate, when on his way to the town,
stationed upon the leafy slopes, and among the
rivulets and streams of the region now known
to you as Islington, he overthrew the British
host under Boadicea, before the site of your
Great Northern Railway Station at Battlebridge.
The remains of a camp, supposed to
be that of Suetonius, were found some time
ago a little northward of the Islington work-
house. The Romans had a wood in the rear of
their camp, and fought the Britons in the valley
of the River Fleet, between the steeps of
Pentonville and the high ground about Gray's Inn-
lane.

London was then a place not dignified with
the name of a colony, but very famous for the
number of its merchants and the traffic through
it. Rome used to export from London, cattle,
hides, and corn, a few of the British dogs, and
many British men, prisoners of war, as slaves.
Her trading galleys brought to London, household
vessels of earthenware and glass for the
use of the settlers in the province, works in
brass, horse-collars, amber toys, and polished
bits of bone. So Strabo says. Being well
inland and readily accessible from the frequented
seas, it was a capital place whither to bring
the odds and ends that Romans in their British
villas could not do without, and could not find
or make in Britain.

The native Britons had, no doubt, chosen the
position of the town for its strength and
pleasantness. They found an amphitheatre of rich
slopes watered with many streams, and rising
from the fishful Thames towards the distant
heights now crowned by the spires of Highgate
and Hampstead. They saw here a position by
the Thames secured to the west by the Fleet
River, to the east by the natural moat of
Walbrook and the Wapping marsh beyond, with a
wide wild forest sheltering them to the north, and
much adjacent marsh to add to their security.
So here they raised their huts and cattle-