“Not to the one we’re going to see, though it stands in exactly the same place. We’ll walk to it through the Chepe.” “It was called _Cheapside_ this morning when we drove down it,” said Betty, smiling. “How funny it is to think it should be really the same place.” “More or less on the same _ground_, at any rate,” Godmother returned. “Here we are.” “It isn’t so very much altered from the time we saw it when Richard the Second was king, is it?” Betty remarked, looking round. “Though some of the houses are larger and grander,” she added. “You see many of them are built of brick and stone now. How handsome they are! This sixteenth century is the age for beautifully-built dwelling-houses. We shall see many of them along the Strand presently, and scattered about all over the City as well.” “There’s Queen Eleanor’s cross, and there are the fountains and the booths and the funny shops, just as they were,” Betty observed. “The same crowds, the same noise, the same bustle!” Godmother agreed. “The costume of the people is different, that’s all. They look very well off and happy, don’t they? England has become richer and much more prosperous lately. There are signs of it everywhere as you will not be long in discovering.” “But there are lots of the old houses left,” Betty said. They had turned out of the Chepe, and were walking down a narrow lane bordered on either side by the timber houses she remembered from her last visit to old-time London,—houses whose top stories so nearly met, that only a narrow strip of sky was visible between them. “Yes, and they will last till the Great Fire sweeps them all away in less than a hundred years’ time. Now here we are at the Royal Exchange.” They were out of the narrow lane now, and there, rising in front of them, was a fine, foreign-looking building of brick and stone with a high sloping roof, and pinnacles at the corners, upon each one of which was placed a huge metal grasshopper. “Do you remember the name of the street I pointed out to you near this spot this morning?” asked Godmother. “Yes. _Gresham_ Street. And we saw a big gilt grasshopper, something like those up there, hanging out from a doorway, in another street close by,” Betty answered.