Many of the names in the City take us back to the very earliest days of the capital. This part of London stands on slightly rising ground, and near the river Thames, just the sort of ground which early people would choose upon which to build a fortress or a village. The names of two of the chief City streets, the Strand and Fleet Street, help to show us something of what London was like in its earliest days. A few years ago, in a famous case in a court of law, one of the lawyers asked a witness what he was doing in the Strand at a certain time. The witness, a witty Irishman, answered with a solemn face, "Picking seaweed." Everybody laughed, because the idea of picking seaweed in the very centre of London was so funny. But a strand _is_ a shore, and when the name was given to the London _Strand_ it was not a paved street at all, but the muddy shore of the river Thames. Then _Fleet Street_ marks the path by which the little river Fleet ran into the Thames. The river had several tributaries, which were covered over in this way, and several of them are used as sewers to carry away the sewage of the city. There is a _Fleet Street_, too, in Hampstead, in the north-west of London, and this marks the beginning of the course of the same little river Fleet which got its water from the high ground of Hampstead. This river has given us still another famous London name. It flowed past what is now called King's Cross, and here its banks were so steep that it was called _Hollow_, or _Hole-bourne_, and from this we get the name _Holborn_. The City being the centre of London had a certain amount of trading and bargaining from the earliest times. In those times there were no such things as shops. People bought and sold in markets, and the name of the busy City street, _Cheapside_, reminds us of this. It was called in early times the _Chepe_, and took its name from the Old English word _ceap_, "a bargain." At the end of Cheapside runs the street called _Poultry_, and this, so an old chronicler tells us, has its name from the fact that a fowl or poultry market was regularly held there up to the sixteenth century. The name of another famous City street, _Cornhill_, tells us that a corn market used to be held there. Another name, _Gracechurch Street_, reminds us of an old grass market. It took its name from an old church, St. Benet Grasschurch, which was probably so called because the grass market was held under its walls. _Smithfield_ is the great London meat market now; but its name means "smooth field," and in the Middle Ages it was used as a cattle and hay market, and on days which were not market days games and tournaments took place there. Later its name became famous in English history for the "fires of Smithfield," when men and women were burned to death there for refusing to accept the state religion.