See, for instance, the corner of old Serjeants' Inn, where it joins Clifford's Inn! It positively caricatures even Dickens. Black, suggestively gruesome as a picture by Hogarth; yet, amid all its dirt, still picturesque; everywhere neglect, rust, grime; windows suggestive of anything but light, broken and stuffed with dirty paper; no sign of life (it being Saturday afternoon), but one old half-starved tabby cat, moved out of her wonted apathy by hearing the welcome voice of the cats' meat boy in neighbouring Chancery Lane! Is she the aged pensioner of some departed inhabitant, and does she, perchance, hope to steal, unperceived, some scrap from that unsavoury basket? As she slinks along the outer railings of the Clifford's Inn enclosure, and across the irregular cobble-stones of the court, one notices that what is by courtesy termed a "garden" is merely a cat walk. It is a railed-in garden of desolation, its turf long ago forgotten, its gravel-paths even obliterated, a dingy strip of earth under a few mangy trees. Surely, nobody can have entered that rusty gate for at least a hundred years! It might be the garden of the "Sleeping Beauty," or at least a London edition of that lady. Poor, deserted closes! bits of vanishing London! The tide of progress will remove you altogether ere long, and build huge blocks of clean, if unromantic, "Chicago" edifices in your place. Yet, their dirt and desolation notwithstanding, can we not almost find it in our hearts to regret these London byways of a past age?