To say that of all the intensely-quiet and respectable houses in that strange portion of the City of London known as Doctors' Commons the Crown coffee-house is the most quiet and respectable, is making a strong assertion, but one which could yet be borne out by facts. It is a sleepy, dreamy neighbourhood still, although its original intense dulness has been somewhat enlivened by the pedestrians who make Paul's Chain a passage to the steamboats calling at Paul's Wharf; and the hansom cabs which find a short cut down Great St. Andrew's Hill to the South-Western Railway. But it is still the resort of abnormal individuals,--ticket-porters, to wit; plethoric individuals in half-dirty white aprons and big badges like gigantic opera-checks, men whose only use seems to be to warn approaching vehicles of the blocking-up of the narrow streets; and sable-clad mottled-faced proctors and their clerks. There are real green trees in Doctors' Commons; and flies and butterflies--by no means bad imitations of the real country insect--are seen there on the wing in the sultry summer days, buzzing round the heads of the ticket-porters, and of the strong men who load the Bottle Company's heavy carts, and who are always flinging huge fragments of rusty iron into the capacious hold of the Mary Anne of Goole, stuck high and dry in the mud off Paul's Wharf before mentioned. Life is rampant in the immediate vicinity,--in enormous Manchester warehouses, perpetually inhaling the contents of enormous Pickford's vans; in huge blocks of offices where the representatives of vast provincial firms take orders and transact business; in corn-stores and iron-companies; in mansions filled from basement to roof with Dresden china and Bohemian glass in insurance-offices and banks; and in the office of the great journal, where the engines for six days out of the seven, are unceasingly throbbing. But in the Commons life gives way to mere existence and vegetation. The organ-man plays unmolested on Addle Hill, and the children's shuttlecocks flutter in Wardrobe Place; no Pickford's vans disturb the calm serenity of Great Knightrider Street; and instead of warehouses and offices, there are quaint old dumpy congregationless churches, big rambling old halls of City Companies, the forgotten old Heralds' College with its purposeless traditions, a few apparently nothing-doing shops, a number of proctors' offices into which man is never seen to enter, and two or three refreshment-rooms. Of these the Crown is the oldest and the dirtiest. It was established--if you may trust the half-effaced legend over its door--in 1790, and it has ever since been doing the same quiet sleepy trade. It cannot understand what Kammerer's means by it. Kammerer's is the refreshment-house at the corner, which has long since escaped from the chrysalis state of coffee-shop, and now, resplendent with plate-glass and mahogany bar, cooks joints, and draws the celebrated "Crm Grw" Llangollen ale, and