was a well-known and much frequented arena for disputations of all sorts. Many a clever speaker has addressed audiences now passed away. Speaker and spoken to are for the most part gone. A great change took place some forty years ago in the locality where St. John's Market now stands. There was a ropewalk here which extended from where the angle of the building faces the Amphitheatre, as far as Renshaw-street. There was a field at one time to the north of the ropery skirted by hedges which went down the site of the present Hood-street, and round to where there is now a large draper's shop in the Old Haymarket; the hedge then went up John's-lane, and so round by the site of the lamp opposite the Queen's Hotel, along Limekiln-lane to Ranelagh-street. These were all fields, being a portion of what was anciently called "the Great Heath." It was at one time intended to erect a handsome Crescent where the cab-stand is now. The almshouses stood on this ground. Limekiln-lane, now Lime-street, was so called from the limekiln that stood on the site of the present Skelhorn-street. Here were open fields, which extended to the London-road, quite famous for the assembling of all sorts of rough characters, especially on summer evenings, and on Sundays. Cock-fighting, dog-fighting, and pugilistic encounters used to be carried on daily, and scenes of the utmost confusion took place, until public murmurings compelled the authorities to keep order. It was in the fields about where the Lord Nelson-street rooms stand, that my grandfather recollects seeing three, if not four, men hung for being mixed up in the rebellion of '45. They were hung there in chains for some time, and afterwards buried at the foot of the gallows as a warning to evil-doers.