dissenting chapel; and Quality Court itself seems, like so many of the purlieus of the smaller Inns, mainly redolent of charwomen, cats, and orange-peel. Nevertheless, even in dingy "Quality Court" there are some respectable houses with quaint old doorways, as well as some good iron-work in the upper balconies. [Illustration: _Fetter Lane._] Some of the neighbouring courts are, however, far more unsavoury. See, for instance, "Fleur-de-Lis" Court, off Fetter Lane, a miserable, dilapidated flagged alley. The last time I visited this place, I found a few dirty children dancing to a poor cripple's playing of a kind of spinet or portable piano (some of the "music" of these peripatetic street-players is of a weird kind). Fleur-de-Lis Court!--charmingly named, but, like all courts with such romantic appellations, particularly grimy and squalid. Further up, away from Fetter Lane, where the "court" or narrow alley becomes even more wretchedly ruinous, is a barn-like place labelled "Newton Hall." It seems at a first glance to be the very abomination of desolation; its rusty door padlocked, with an air, too, of never-being-opened. Is there anything, I wondered at a first glance, more dismal in all London? Yet, on looking nearer, I seemed to see something comparatively clean shining on the wall of "Newton Hall," amid the surrounding grime. Can it be,--yes, it is,--a label,--and apparently affixed there within the memory of man: "Positivist Society." Surely, I reflected, the Positivist Cause must be in a bad way, if the dilapidation of the buildings be any guide to the state of the persuasion itself! It is, however, unfair to judge the state of Positivism from Fleur-de-Lis Court, for the whole neighbourhood has, evidently, but a short span of life remaining, and the court and its purlieus will soon be things of the past. Positivism is already removing or removed; and Newton Hall, till Fleur-de-Lis Court is transmogrified in the march of progress into offices or model-dwellings, will rust for some few years in peace.