You remember the story of the princes smothered in the Tower by command of their cruel uncle? There was the narrow passage in the wall where the murderers came at night; the worn step by which they entered the great, bare room where the little victims slept; the winding stairs down which the bodies were thrown. Beneath the great stone at the foot they were secretly buried. Then the stairway was walled up, lest the stones should cry out; and no one knew the story of the burial until long, long afterwards--only a few years since--when the walled-up stairway was discovered, the stones at the foot displaced, and a heap of dust, of little crumbling bones, revealed it. A rosy-faced, motherly woman, the wife of a soldier quartered in the barracks here, answered the rap of the guide upon the nail-studded door opening from one of the courts, and told us the old story. "The bed of the princes stood just there," she said, pointing to one corner, where, by a curious coincidence, a little bed was standing now. She answered the question in our eyes with, "My boys sleep there." "But do you not fear that the murderers will come back some night by this same winding way, and smother them?" How she laughed! And, indeed, what had ghosts to do with such a cheery body! Down through the "Traitors' Gate," with its spiked portcullis, we could see the steps leading to the water. Through this gate prisoners were brought from trial at Westminster. It is said that the Princess Elizabeth was dragged up here when she refused to come of her own will, knowing too well that they who entered here left hope behind. A little later, with music and the waving of banners, and amid the shouts of the people, she rode out of the great gates into the city, the Queen of England. THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT. Though they have stood barely thirty years, already the soft gray limestone begins to crumble away,--the elements, with a sense of the fitness of things, striving to act the part of time, and bring them into a likeness of the adjoining abbey. There is an exquisite beauty in the thousand gilded points and pinnacles that pierce the fog, or shine softly through the mist that veils the city. Ethereal, shadowy, unreal they are, like the spires of a celestial city, or the far away towers and turrets we see sometimes at sunset in the western sky.