Betty was interested in the quaint old map, but it was one thing to look at a map, and quite another to walk in the actual streets it represented, and she longed for the afternoon. * * * * * “How shall we get back to-day?” she asked when the time came. “There are many ways of getting into the Past,” Godmother replied. “Sometimes a single word, or the sight of a picture, or a line of poetry is the magic that will send one there in the twinkling of an eye. To-day we will try one line from a poem written by a man called William Dunbar. No one has ever praised London better than this poet, who saw the city in the sixteenth century, though about fifty years before Elizabeth came to the throne. Shut your eyes, take this book in your hand, and say after me the line with which each verse of Dunbar’s poem ends: “_London, thou art the flower of Cities all_,” repeated Betty obediently.... “Now you may look!” said Godmother after a pause and as Betty’s eyes flew open, she added, “We are in the middle of the sixteenth century. Elizabeth is Queen, and here we are once more on London Bridge.” They were standing by the tower at the entrance gate, looking towards the tower at the other end, leading into Southwark, but Betty did not at first recognize it as the same bridge on which she had stood in the Middle Ages. “Why, it looks more like a _street_ than a bridge,” she cried. And indeed when they began to walk across it, she and Godmother _were_ in a street. Gabled houses lined the parapets on either hand, shutting out any view of the river, and at the foot of all the houses, were shops. Half-way across the bridge stood a fantastic-looking house which Godmother said was called _Nonsuch_,—a perfectly delightful name, Betty decided. Then came an open space from which one could look up and down the river before the houses and shops closed in again and extended right up to the gate and towers at the Southwark end of the bridge. “Oh, how it’s altered!” cried Betty. “But the little Chapel of St. Thomas is there still, and it’s the same bridge, of course, only built over with all these funny old houses. And how the dress of the people has altered too,” she went on. “Look at this lady coming with the enormous ruff round her neck.” “But they’re still very gay, aren’t they?” remarked Godmother. “Here’s a fine young man approaching, with his long crimson silk stockings and his slashed doublet, and the little red velvet cloak hanging from one shoulder. You see the men are quite as gaily dressed as the women. Just as they were in the fourteenth century. Only now the costume both for men and women has changed.” “London’s grown bigger since we last saw it,” said Betty, looking right and left up and down the river from the open space where she stood.