Botolph, Aldgate, which now possesses also its chief claim to fame. For, though the little church still possesses some good monuments, the relic formerly shown here, the dessicated head of a man, said to be the Duke of Suffolk, father of Lady Jane Grey, is now removed to the larger church. The decapitated head is certainly sufficiently ghastly, with the neck still showing the usual first stroke of the bungling executioner, and the loose teeth, yellow skin, and mouth with "the curve of agony" to which attention is usually drawn. The evidence for the head being that of the Duke of Suffolk rests mainly on the fact that the Church of "Holy Trinity" was the chapel of the Duke of Suffolk's town-house, and the place whither his head would naturally be brought after decapitation on Tower-hill. At No. 9, Minories, over the shop of one John Owen, nautical instrument-maker, is the figure of the "Little Midshipman," described by Dickens in _Dombey and Son_. But it is difficult to walk in the Minories; everywhere crates and cranes seem to threaten you, and paper from printing offices bristles from windows on to your devoted head.... This must always have been a noisy quarter. In old days it was famous for its gunsmiths, as witness Congreve's lines: "The mulcibers who in the Minories sweat, And massive bars on stubborn anvils beat--" You leave the Minories without regret, and turn your face again Citywards. The church of All Hallows, Barking (so called from the nuns of old Barking Abbey), is further west, in Great Tower Street, close to the Tower precincts. It is another church that escaped the Great Fire, and it contains the graves of some of the Tower victims. It has also some good monumental brasses, one especially, of fine Flemish workmanship, in the pavement in the centre of the nave. These old City churches are now most of them well served and tended, the Sunday services in some of them being much sought after. They are also probably kept in better repair than in Dickens's time, when, overgrown, dirty, and isolated in the midst of traffic and bustle, they struck the novelist only with their weird desolation,--a desolation as of some sentient and human thing. Thus vividly he described his feelings while attending service in one of them: