In the third chapter of the first book, Dickens gives one of those telling pen-pictures of London for which he had no rival. It is of rather a dull and doleful hue, and depicts the aspect the city presents on a Sunday: "gloomy, close and stale." Arthur Clennam had just arrived from Marseilles by way of Dover and its coach "The Blue-Eyed Maid," and "sat in the window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They _won't_ come, they _won't_ come, they _won't_ come! At the five minutes it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair. 'Thank heaven!' said Clennam when the hour struck, and the bell stopped." [Illustration: THE LONDON COFFEE HOUSE, LUDGATE HILL _From an old Engraving_] The particular coffee-house in whose window Clennam sat was the famous old London Coffee-House, and the particular church whose bells prompted his reflections, so microscopically described by the novelist, must have been St. Martin's next door. There can be little doubt of this, for we are told that Clennam "sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment.... Presently the rain began to fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster." That "public passage opposite" must have been what is now the entrance to Ludgate Square. With these facts to guide us, we can supply the name and location of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. It exists to-day, nestling close to St. Martin's Church, on the west side, and, but for the substitution of a plate-glass shop-front, is to all intents and purposes unchanged in its outward appearances from what it was when Clennam sat in meditation at one of its windows. The illustration from an old engraving by S. Jenkins, after a drawing by G. Shepherd, shows the coffee-house and church as they were in 1814; and, if comparison of the picture of the former building is made with the present structure, it will be seen that it is practically identical, except so far as the ground floor is concerned.