CHAPTER XXI. The reader does not require to be informed, that the aspect of London in those days was very different from that which it shows at present. The great fire had not yet swept away that foul nest of narrow streets and tall houses, in which the plague lingered, almost as pertinaciously as in the lanes of an Oriental city; nor had the increasing population yet spread itself over the fields, or swallowed up the villages, by which the great metropolis of England was surrounded in former times, but which have been gradually covered with the mansions of succeeding races of the fashionable world, and fringed by the snug villas of commercial men, till the town is so gradually blended with the country, that it is scarcely possible to say where the one ends and the other begins. Those large squares which have retained, in some instances to the present day, the name of fields, were then fields indeed. Boys and girls went a-Maying where balls and suppers are now held; and within about a quarter of a mile of Lincoln's Inn, a small, tall-chimneyed house, four stories high on one side, and two on another, with a round tower of brick-work added to contain the staircase, which seemed to have been forgotten in the original construction, rose in the midst of a garden, very near the spot where gentlemen in curious wigs and black gowns now hurry about to plead the cause of the rich, but not in general of the poor, if they can help it. At the garden gate of this house, in the beginning of August, a coach stopped one day about three of the clock, and two ladies with the usual masks on their faces descended, and walked with a quick pace towards the door in the round tower. Before they reached it, however, that door was opened by the small page whom we have seen accompanying Master Weston, otherwise Doctor Foreman, and who, when at home, had the office, which he performed most acutely, of looking through a small loophole in the tower, to examine strictly all the personages who approached the Doctor's house. Without any question, the two ladies walked straight up stairs, and, tapping at the door on the second floor, were answered by a voice from within which bade them enter. The shorter and stouter immediately lifted the latch, and then drew back, to suffer her taller and more graceful companion to pass. The other lady did so, and, advancing straight to the table, touched the worthy Doctor Foreman on the shoulder, without, however, prevailing upon him to raise his head from some strange and extraordinary figures, which he was tracing with a pen upon a slip of parchment. His gay and glittering attire, as a foreign cavalier, had now been cast aside, and he was robed in a black gown trimmed with fur, having a small velvet cap upon his head. So profoundly busy did he seem, that all he replied, when the Countess of Essex touched him, was "Enter--enter, why do you not come in?" "The man's mad," cried the Countess.