It is, however, when we cross London Bridge and enter the Borough that we come to the region of inn-yards. Here began the road to Canterbury, and here, in the old times, the waggons and coaches arrived with their goods and passengers; and we are at once struck with the innumerable yards and small inclosures into which these vehicles used to drive. There were a large number of these inns, most of which remain in some shape, surviving at least as public-houses. There were the old “King’s Head,” the old “White Hart,” the new “White Hart,” the “Old George,” the “Queen’s Head,” the “Nag’s Head,” and the “Spur.” Few only of the old pattern remain, and their days, or hours in one case, are certainly numbered. The first is the old “King’s Head,” of which a fragment--some thirty or forty yards long--still stands all ruinous and forlorn, with its two ancient galleries or balustrades in a sadly tottering state, its anatomy exposed in a heartless fashion at each end. One could be sentimental and mournful over it. It is surrounded by new spick and span brickwork, and a new “King’s Head” insolently confronts it and seems to flourish. [Illustration: THE WHITE HART.] “In the Borough,” says the author of “Pickwick,” “there still remain some half-a-dozen old inns which have preserved their external features unchanged. Great, rambling, queer old places they are, with galleries and passages and staircases, wide enough and antiquated enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories. It was in the yard of one of these inns--of no less celebrated a one than the ‘White Hart,’ that a man was employed in brushing the dirt off a pair of boots:” the introduction as the world knows, of Mr. Pickwick to the immortal Samuel Weller. The yard is then described: “It presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual characteristics of a large coach inn. Three or four lumbering waggons, each with a pile of goods beneath its ample canopy about the height of a second-floor window of an ordinary house, were stowed away beneath a lofting which extended over one end of the yard; and another, which was to commence its journey in the morning, was drawn out into an open space. A double tier of bedroom galleries with old clumsy balustrades ran round two sides of the straggling area, and a double row of bells to correspond, sheltered from the weather by a little sloping roof, hung over the door leading to the bar and coffee-room. Two or three gigs or chaise-carts were wheeled up under different little sheds and pent-houses.”