THERE is a tintinnabulary, jingling sound in the name of Lynn that predisposes one to like the place, whether it be actually likeable or not. Has anyone ever stopped to consider how nearly like the name of this old seaport is to that of London? Possibly the conjunction of London and Lynn has not occurred to any who have visited the town, but to those who have arrived at it by the pages of this book, the similarity will be interesting. The names of both London and Lynn, then, derive from the geographical peculiarities of their sites, in many respects singularly alike. Both stand beside the lower reaches of a river, presently to empty itself into the sea, and the ground on which they stand has always been marshy. At one period, indeed, those were not merely marshes where Lynn and London now stand, but wide-spreading lakes--fed by the lazy overflowings of Ouse and Thames. The Celtic British, who originally settled by these lakes, called them _llyns_, and this ancient seaport has preserved that prehistoric title in its original purity, only dropping the superfluous "l"; but London's present name somewhat disguises its first style of _Llyn dun_, or the "hill by the lake"; some inconsiderable, but fortified, hillock rising above the shallow waters. When the Saxons came, Lynn was here, and when the Norman conquerors reached the Norfolk coast they found it a busy port. To that early Norman prelate, Herbert de Losinga, a tireless builder of churches throughout East Anglia, the manor fell, and the town consequently became known for four hundred and thirty years as Lynn Episcopi. It was only when the general confiscation of religious property took place under Henry the Eighth that it became the "Kings Lynn" it has ever since remained. [Illustration: THE SOUTH GATES, LYNN.] To the "average man," Lynn is well known. Although he has never journeyed to it, he knows this ancient seaport well; not as a port or as a town at all, but only as a name. The name of Lynn, in short, is rooted in his memory ever since he read Hood's poem, the "Dream of Eugene Aram." Aram was no mere creation of a poet's brain, but a very real person. His story is a tragic one, and appealed not only to Hood, but to Bulwer Lytton, who weaved much romance out of his career. Aram was born in 1704, in Yorkshire, and adopted the profession of a schoolmaster. It was at Knaresborough, in 1745, that the events happened that made him a wanderer, and finally brought him to the scaffold.