II. Until lately, in the year 1889, when the frenzy for Improvement and the rage for Rent wiped it out, I could have shown you a queer bit of cobble wall, set in and thus saved from ruin by the new wall of the Metal Exchange. These few square feet of stone were the sole remaining relic of the chapel of the old manor-house of Leadenhall--so named from its roofing of lead, rare in those days--which house had been presented to the City of London by the munificent Richard Whittington in 1408, to be used as a granary and market. It escaped the Great Fire, and its chapel was not torn down until June, 1812. This piece of its wall, having been preserved then, was built in with, and so formed part of, the old East India House. That famous structure stretched its stately and severe façade along Leadenhall Street just beyond Gracechurch Street, and so around the corner into Lime Street. It was, withal, a gloomy [Illustration: THE EAST INDIA HOUSE. [From an old print in the British Museum.]] pile, with its many-columned Ionic portico. Its pediment contained a stone sovereign of Great Britain, holding an absurd umbrella-shaped shield over the sculptured figures of eastern commerce; its front was dominated by Britannia comfortably seated, at her right Europe, on a horse, and at her left Asia, on a camel. Within its massive walls--holding memories of Warren Hastings and of Cornwallis, of Mill, gathering material for his history of India, and of Hoole, translating Tasso in leisure hours--were spacious halls and lofty rooms, statues and pictures, a museum of countless curiosities from the East. Beneath were vaults stored with a goodly share of the wealth of Ormus and of Ind, and dungeons wherein were found--on the downfall of John Company, in 1860, and the destruction of his fortress a little later--chains and fetters, and a narrow passage leading to a concealed postern: these last for the benefit of the victims of John’s press-gang, entrapped, drugged, shipped secretly down the river, and so sent across water to serve Clive and Coote as food for powder. Upstairs, at a desk, sat Charles Lamb, keeping accounts in big books during “thirty-three years of slavery,” as he phrased it: of unfailing and untiring--albeit not untired--devotion to his duties, as his employers well knew. It was in April, 1792, just as he became seventeen, that he was first chained to this hard desk; and it came about in this way.