What Londoner has not, from earliest childhood, been acquainted with the Tower? In the Christmas holidays it presented, as a "treat," rival attractions with Madame Tussaud's and the "Zoo." When not presented under the too-informing care of over-zealous pastors and masters,--when not imbibed as too flagrant material for that fly-in-the-ointment, a holiday task,--when not made, in a word, too suggestive of the unpleasant, but necessary paths of learning,--it offered great fascinations to the youthful mind. The warders, in their picturesque "Beefeater" dress, were ever an unfailing joy; the surprise, indeed, with which I first saw one of these mighty beings descend from his pedestal, and deign to hold simple conversation with ordinary mortals, is still fresh in my memory. Then, the towers and dark passages, up which one could run and clatter joyfully, with all the entrancing and horrid possibility of meeting somebody's headless ghost; the attractive thumbscrew, model of the rack, and headsman's mask, all so appealing to the innocent brutality of childhood; the very wooden and highly coloured "Queen Elizabeth", riding in full dress, with a page, to Tilbury Fort; the stiff effigies of the mail-clad soldiers, in rows inside the White Tower,--the live soldiers drilling in the sun-lit square outside;--the inspiring music of the band, the roll of the drum, the flocks of wheeling pigeons; how charming it all was! My first knowledge of Tower history was derived from a Cockney nursemaid, who had, I suspect, strong affinities with the before-mentioned "pretty soldiers" (are not "pretty soldiers," by-the-way, usually the first words that London children learn to lisp?). Tragedies, I knew, were connected with that sun-lit square. Two beautiful ladies, I was told, had had their heads cut off here by their cruel husband, a gentleman called "'Enery the Eighth," (I naturally thought of this "'Enery" as Bluebeard); "because they was that skittish like, and fond of singin' and dancin' on Sundays, which 'e for one never could abear; and so 'e 'ad their 'eds orf, and grass adn't never grown on the place sence." Which fact I identified as true, at least for the time being; though how far grass can grow through paving-stones, is always matter for speculation. And Mary-Anne further went on to relate how she "'ad a friend who knew a young woman who was a 'ousekeeper somewhere here, who 'ad seen 'orrible things in the way of ghostisses, and 'ad the screamin' 'sterrics somethin' awful;--quite reg'ler, too,--after it!" [Illustration: _A Beefeater._]