Those of my readers who can remember the entrance to the broad highway of Holborn nearly fifty years ago—stay, that is going back beyond probable acknowledgment,—let me say those of us who knew Smithfield when it was a cattle market, who had heard of "Cow Cross," and been told of the terrible purlieux of Field Lane; who had occasionally caught a glimpse of that foul wilderness of courts that clustered about the Fleet Ditch; had read of Mr. Fagin, when "Oliver Twist" was first appearing in chapters, and had dim recollections of nursery tales about Bartlemy fair and "hanging morning" at the Old Bailey; those of us who remember the cries of drovers, and the lowing and bleating of herds and flocks in the streets on Sunday nights; the terrible descent of Snow Hill; the confusion and dismay of {266} passengers and vehicles on the steep incline of Holborn Hill; the reek of all that maze of houses and hovels that lay in the valley; those of us, in short, who can carry our memories back for a few years beyond the time when the new cattle market was built at Islington, the pens and lairs of Smithfield demolished, the whole Holborn valley dismantled, only a remnant, a mere corner, of Field Lane being left standing after the great viaduct was built—can imagine what the church of St. Andrew was like when, with its dark and dreary churchyard, it stood on the slope of Holborn Hill, instead of being as it now is in a kind of subway. That churchyard, with its iron gate, was reached by stone steps, which were receptacles for winter rain and summer dust, the straw from waggons, the shreds and sweepings from adjacent shops, the dirt and refuse of the streets. On those steps a young girl was seen lying one night, in the winter of 1827—lying helpless, lonely, perishing of disease and famine. The clocks of St. Andrew, St. Sepulchre, St. Paul, had clanged and boomed amidst the hurry and the turmoil of the throng of passengers; had clanged and boomed till their notes might be heard above the subsiding roar of vehicles, and the shuffling of feet, till silence crept over the great city, and more distant chimes struck through the murky air, tolling midnight. Still that figure lay upon the cruel stones, under the rusty gate of the churchyard, as though, unfriended and unpitied by the world, she waited for admission to the only place in which she might make a claim in death, if not in life.