At the corner of Wood Street when daylight appears, There's a thrush that sings loud; it has sung for three years. Poor Susan has passed by the spot, and has heard, In the silence of morning, the song of the bird. A clock without a face, set in a church steeple, is the strange detail of the church of St. Vedast in Foster Lane opposite the Post Office, east. No other church in London has its like. It has all the works of a regular clock, but there are no dials, a bell proclaiming the hours. Near the northeast corner of St. Paul's Cathedral at the top of Ludgate Hill, once stood the Cross of St. Paul, where for centuries before the present cathedral was built sermons were preached, heretics were made to recant and witches to confess. The pulpit was destroyed by order of Parliament in 1643. Where the cathedral stands a church has been from very early times. The first is believed to have been built by Christians in the time of the Romans. There certainly was a church here, which was reconstructed under Ethelbert, King of Kent, in 610. It was burned in 961 and immediately rebuilt. Again in 1087 it was destroyed by fire and a new church begun at once, but this was not completed for more than 200 years. This Old St. Paul's, being many times restored, finally came to an end in the Great Fire of 1666. The present cathedral was begun in 1675, from designs by Sir Christopher Wren, and completed in 1710. The open way called St. Paul's Churchyard was of much greater extent around Old St. Paul's than it is about the cathedral of this day. Then it extended quite to the present Paternoster Row on the north and to Carter Lane on the south. On the northern side were the business places of many booksellers just as in Paternoster Row now; and to the south were several taverns of renown. Here, where Bell Yard is, to the north of Knightrider Street, was the Doctors' Commons where, previous to 1861, marriage licenses were issued. Right here, too, where the archway leads into Bell Yard from Carter Lane is a tablet to mark the site of the old Bell Tavern, where Shakespeare and his companions used to meet and talk about the plays which were afterwards to delight an entire world. The Chapter Coffee House of the 18th century ceased to exist in 1854, but on its old site, at the eastern end of Paternoster Row, is a new tavern. There has been a house of public entertainment on this spot for more than two hundred years. In its palmy days the Chapter was the gathering place of the booksellers whose business places were in this locality, and many of them still continue here. To the Chapter, Charlotte Brontë and her sister came on their first visit to London, much to the surprise of the proprietor who never remembered ever before having women guests. The Brontës had heard their father mention the Chapter, and as it was the only inn they knew by name they came here.