The next turning on the right from Great Tower Street is Seething Lane, leading to Hart Street, noted principally for that ancient church of St. Olave that was one of the Great Fire's few survivals. Its little churchyard opens on to the muddy, narrow alley called Seething Lane, by a picturesque gateway, grimly decorated with carven skulls; tradition says in the memory of the many plague victims buried here. Indeed it is a grisly monument of the time when the plague-cart rumbled in the streets, when a red cross marked the infected houses, and when the stones echoed to the hoarse and terrible cry, "Bring out your dead!" Perhaps Seething Lane was less muddy and slummy in Samuel Pepys's time; for that authority lived here, in a house "adjoining the Navy Office," where he held the position of "Clerk of the Acts,"--and surely he was nothing if not fussy. The locality, owing to the successive distractions of Plague and Fire, cannot have been exactly peaceful. In his "Diary" entry for January 30th, 1665-6, Pepys says: "It frighted me indeed to go through the church, more than I thought it could have done, to see so many graves lie so high upon the churchyard where people have been buried of the Plague. I was much troubled at it, and do not think to go through it again a good while." The quaint names of old London churches are very attractive. This St. Olave, or Olaf, was a favourite saint of ancient London; he was an eleventh-century Scandinavian king, canonised because of his zealous propagation of Christianity among his people. Three other London churches, in Southwark, Jewry, and Silver Street (the last two no longer existing), were called after him. The immediate purlieus of St. Olave's, Hart Street, are not exactly savoury, its proximity to the river traffic and warehouses making it occasionally somewhat odoriferous as well as muddy; it were better, therefore, to choose a fine, dry day for this excursion. It is not always easy to get inside the church; on week-days, the street seems to be more or less of a stagnant back-water; and should your fate compel you to find St. Olave's locked, you may stand and knock all day, but nobody will heed you; or, if they do heed, will probably put you down as a wandering lunatic. Nevertheless, St. Olave's should be visited; for its monuments are many and interesting. Samuel Pepys, as parishioner and near neighbour, used to attend service here, with his pretty wife; and Mrs. Pepys's bust, in white marble, erected by her husband, stands on the north side of the chancel, above her tablet and long epitaph. Poor Elizabeth Pepys! She was only twenty-nine when she died, and that long, artificial Latin screed seems all too long and laboured for her lovely and poetic youth. Perhaps her husband, whose pew faces the monument, liked during his long widowhood to gaze at that charming memorial, and--who knows?--to enjoy his fine Latin composition. Pepys