King Charles engaged Dr. Wren to make an estimate for a building at Windsor for the use of the Queen; it was to be of considerable size, containing a chapel, a banqueting room, galleries and rooms for the Lord Chamberlain and court officials. The estimate exists in business-like detail, the total amounting to 13,305_l._; but it was probably not even begun. [CHRISTOPHER AT WESTMINSTER.] To his other employments the Dean added the tender care of his young son. Christopher's case was one of those rare ones in which a precocious child not only lives to grow up, but also amply fulfils his early promise. His delicate health was the cause of much anxiety to his father and to his sister Susan, and it may be that the skill in nursing and medicine for which she was afterwards famous, had their beginning in her watchful care of her little brother. His frail health seems to have been rather a spur than a hindrance to his studies, and when very young he had a tutor, the Rev. W. Shepheard, who prepared him for Westminster, where he was sent in his ninth or tenth year. Westminster was then under the rule of its famous headmaster Dr. Busby, to whose especial care young Christopher was committed. The school with its stir of life, the grand abbey, the Houses of Parliament then empty and silent, Lambeth, from which his uncle's friend, Archbishop Laud, might be seen frequently coming across the river in his barge; the whole surroundings must have been wonderful to the country-bred boy who was one day to connect his name indissolubly with that of London. Did he, one cannot but wonder, ever on a holiday take boat down the river, shooting the dangerous arches of London Bridge, and look at S. Paul's with its long line of roof, its tall tower and shattered spire; little S. Gregory's nestling by its side, and all the workmen busied on the repairs which had been begun after King James's solemn thanksgiving in 1620? Laud, while Bishop of London, had carried on the works with a vigour that had given them a fresh impetus, and was one great cause of his unpopularity. Inigo Jones had superintended them and finished the interior, and at the west end, the stately portico of Portland stone, which, though incongruous, was in itself beautiful, was being erected by King Charles's orders. How little could the boy have guessed at the ruin which was approaching those pious builders, or the desecration and destruction that awaited the fine old building itself! At school no pains were spared with so promising a pupil as young Wren soon showed himself to be. His sister Susan married, in 1643, Mr. William Holder, subdean of the Chapel Royal, of a Nottinghamshire family, a good mathematician, and one 'who had good skill in the practic and theoretic parts of music'[27] Susan Wren was sixteen when she married, and though childless the marriage was a very happy one.