This is a world of change; but the time was when you could turn by Saint Clement's Church, from the roar of the waves of life in the Strand, and make your way between a baked-potato can--perspiring violently in its efforts to supply the demands made upon it--and a tin of hot eels, steaming in a pasty mud; then under a gateway, past old-clothes shops and marine-store dealers; thread your way along between crooked tumbledown houses in dismal fever-breeding lanes, which led you into the far-famed region of Lincoln's-inn, where law stared you in the face at every turn. It will doubtless behave in as barefaced a manner to you at the present day; but you will have to approach it by a different route, for the auctioneer's hammer has given those preliminary taps that herald the knocking-down of a vast collection of the houses of old London; and perhaps ere these sheets are in the press, first stones will be laid of the buildings to occupy the site as law-courts. But take we the region as it was, with its frowsy abodes and their tenants. They are clipped away now; but in every direction, crowding in upon the great inns of court, were dilapidated houses pressing upon it like miserable suitors asking for their rights, or like rags of the great legal gown. But it is a rare place is Lincoln's-inn--a place where the law is rampant, and the names of its disciples are piled in monuments upon the door-posts--a place where you may pick your legal adviser according to the length of your purse. The doors stand open, and the halls are cold, cheerless, and echoing, while the large carven keystone looks down at the entering client with its stony eyes, which seem to wink and ogle as the sly, sneering, tongue-thrusting image apparently chuckles at the folly of man. The cold shivers are always out in Lincoln's-inn, and they attack you the moment you enter the precincts; probably they are spirits of past-and-gone suitors, in past-and-gone suits, wandering to avenge themselves upon the legal fraternity by freezing the courage of litigants and turning them back when about to perform that wholesale shovelling of an estate into the legal dust-cart known as "throwing it into Chancery." Cold stone posts stand at intervals along the sides of the square, looking, in their grey, bleak misery, like to stripped and bare clients waiting for redress at their legal advisers' doors. A dreary place for an assignation, if your friend possesses not the virtue of punctuality; for the eye wanders in vain for some pleasant oasis where it may rest. You have not here in autumn those melancholy, washed-out flowers--the chrysanthemums of the Temple, but you may gaze through prison-like bars at soot-dusted grass--verdure apparently splashed with ink from the surrounding offices; at the trees, adapted by nature to the circumstances of their fate; for, as in the arctic zone the thinly-clad animals grow furry as a protection from the cold, so