Pie-corner, where the structures remain as of old, before the Great Fire stopped short at that bounding locality. My quarters were at the Axe Inn, Aldermanbury. This is not very far from Christ-Church hospital; and the Blue-coat boys—whom I daily met, in their yellow nether-stocks, dark frocks, and clerical bands—carried me back to the times of old, and made me a frequent visitor of those antique and hospitably open cloisters. My studies toward the Law, were to be under the guidance of a gentleman of Gray’s Inn, long since dead; John Thweat, Esq.—His son is now a solicitor in chancery—He was a typical Englishman. In his wig—when he drove in a chaise, without hat, to Westminster Hall—his face was not unlike a boiled lobster, in a garnish of cauliflower. I soon found that my study was to be pen-work, and that my apprenticeship—if entered into—would be a slavish drawing of forms. My father was easier in his ways every year; so he assented to my spending a few months in travel. Do not imagine that I am going to record my journeys? These were the glorious old days of coaching. From the George Inn, opposite Addle street, Aldermanbury, I used to see forty coaches set out. It was near my lodgings. The Hogarthian coachman was then not extinct. In my last visit, I detected one or two of the old sort, degenerated into omnibus-men. Hyde Park was not what it has since become, but it was a marvel, nevertheless; and I studied, with daily application, the heraldry of all the turn-outs, and the horsemanship of gentlemen in boots and small-clothes, who, to my American eyes, seemed sad riders, from the English trick of “rising to the trot.” But when summer was over, and the short days came on, and the shops had candles at noon, and the Strand and Holburn were dank and miry, and London smoke became a wetting nimbus, I gathered up my odds and ends, and make a dash over to Ireland. But this should be reserved for another chapter. CHAPTER IV. “That Latin was no more difficile, Than to a black-bird ’tis to whistle.” Butler. The sloop which conveyed me from Holy Island to Kingstown, on my way to Dublin, had on board a merry Irishman, to whom I found myself attracted, because he had been in America. He was further acquainted with the family into which my mother’s brother had intermarried—the O’Mearas of Dundalk, of whom one, who was an officer in the garrison, was the object of my present visit. Dennis was full of odd stories about Irish schoolmasters, fit successors of Swift’s Tom Sheridan; and he informed me that Captain O’Meara had once been a classical tutor, and was still rather conceited in regard to his attainments. He was a companion of Doctor Barrett, of Trinity College, and, as Dennis affirmed, carried more book-learning under a red-coat than many a bishop under a black one. But the half had not been told me.