Just east of Bishopsgate is Houndsditch (its somewhat unpleasantly suggestive name commemorating the ancient City moat), with, near by, the Jewish quarter of St. Mary Axe, "Rag Fair," and Petticoat Lane (now Middlesex Street), noted, like Brick Lane, Spitalfields, for its Sunday morning markets. Why is the Jewish quarter so invariably concerned with old clothes? As the rhyme says: "Jews of St. Mary Axe, of jobs so wary That for old clothes they'd even axe St. Mary." Close by Houndsditch is Bevis Marks (Bury's Marks), now descended from its ancient glories; it used to contain the City mansion, "fair courts and garden plots," of the Abbots of Bury St. Edmunds, but now principally recalls Dickens's unsavoury characters, Miss Sally Brass and her brother Sampson (in _The Old Curiosity Shop_). Here, once again, Dickens gets thoroughly the strange, semi-human spirit of London slums and by-ways; it is in such places that his genius attains its highest flights. That he was always, too, very careful as regarded his details, is shown in a letter on this subject to his friend Forster. He spent (he says), a whole morning in Bevis Marks, selecting: "the office window, with its threadbare green curtain all awry; its sill just above the two steps which lead from the side-walk to the office door, and so close on the footway that the passenger who takes the wall brushes the dim glass with his elbow." It seems, however, almost too invidious to select special rambles. For, the whole of this heart of the city,--except only for certain well-defined "infernos" of modern industry and ugliness, such as the great Liverpool-Street terminus, must be deeply interesting to every Londoner and every Englishman. Even in comparatively dull streets, lined with warehouses and offices, there will always be some little oasis to rest and refresh the wanderer. Suppose that, instead of going up Cornhill, you take another wheel-spoke from the Mansion-House; say Lombard-Street, the home _par excellence_ of the bankers. This street is solid and stately, as you would expect; the very name has a moneyed ring about it! The derivation of the name, by-the-way, is curious; it comes from Lombard bankers who appear to have settled here at an early date; the street bore their name in the reign of Edward II. The square tower, crowned by an octagonal spire, that rises on the north side of Lombard Street, is that of the church of St. Edmund the King and Martyr, in which was made poor Addison's not too happy marriage with the Dowager Countess of Warwick and Holland. Still continuing east, past Gracechurch Street, we come to Fenchurch Street, a thoroughfare that runs parallel with the busy mart of Eastcheap, famed in Shakespeare, and possibly no less dirty and noisy than it was in Dame Quickly's time. Out of Fenchurch Street opens Mincing Lane, a name that commemorates the "minchens" or nuns of St. Helen's; that convent owned a great deal of property about here.