There is something very beautiful and almost poetical in the domestic history of these early bankers, telling us that their honesty and honour were upheld by a rigid adherence to pure morality, which is confirmed by the many marriages which took place between the apprentices and their masters' daughters. Day after day, and year after year, did these youthful citizens live under the same roof, and under the strong control of the same strict masters, practising every kind of self-denial for her sake, whom they perhaps saw but once a day, or it might be at each meal-time; or, in strict establishments, only once a week, when they walked behind her to St. Mary's Woolnoth, which stood on the site of the modern church our engraving represents. Through the dim light of bygone years we are enabled to see a face here and an arm there, a faint guarded smile, that would fall like a sunbeam all day long on the heavy ledger, as the youthful lover bent over his desk and sighed for a moment as he thought of his stern task-master; then, like Ferdinand in _The Tempest_, exclaimed, as he conjured up the image of his beautiful mistress-- "Oh, she is ten times more gentle than her father's crabbed!" At the present day there is nothing either grand or striking in this wealthy street. You see, here and there, a name on a common brass plate which, in the commercial world, is "a tower of strength;" except this, there is no visible sign of the "unsunned treasures" that lie within. The houses have a plain, substantial look--a kind of commanding solidity, which seems in accordance with their unostentatious owners. Enter, and you tread the true "Californian" regions, where the gold is ready minted: bring a good cheque, and you need neither spade nor shovel; the "digging and the washing" are not required here. What a staff of clerks! all busily engaged. What a number of ledgers are in use! And after the day's business is closed, all those account-books are stowed away in a fire-proof room under ground, and brought up again in the morning, and placed in readiness before the banker's clerks arrive; and in some of these houses expensive machinery has been fitted up, to facilitate the lowering and raising of the bulky ledgers in and out of the fire-proof vaults below. Look at that young man, with his banking-case chained under his arm; the rolls of cheques and notes he holds in his hand probably amount to thousands of pounds; he only catches the eye of one of the clerks, calls out the amount, hands the bulky bundle over the brass railing, and departs, leaving the sum to be counted over at leisure. See how carelessly the cashier handles that heavy bag of gold: he has no time to count it, but thrusts it into the scale as a coal-heaver would a sack of coals--so long as it's weight, that's all he cares about; he then shoots it out into his large drawer, and throws the bag aside as if he did not mind a straw whether a