With his arm linked in that of Charles Marston, Mr. Winkworth, such as I have described him, walked on towards the city; and much did he seem to marvel at all he saw by the way. It was not, indeed, that he was unacquainted with London; but cities as well as people change their dress, only with this difference, that they very often grow smarter as they grow older. The new garb of his old friend, however, was apparently not at all to Mr. Winkworth's taste. He commented on all he saw with splenetic causticity, declaring that the good old brick houses of Swallow Street, with their plain brown faces, were infinitely preferable to the lath-and-plaster edifices of Regent Street and Waterloo Place, which he pronounced an insult to architecture, and a hodge-podge of every sort of enormity. Then, again, the macadamised streets excited his indignation: they had not yet been paved with wood, or heaven knows what he would have said of them; but as they were, he declared that their sole object must be to wet the feet and splash the apparel of the lieges of the land. "My dear sir," he said, "this is true modern reform and improvement. It is a good specimen of the customs and legislation of the age. Everything that the wisdom of ten or twelve centuries, and the experience of whole races of men, have devised and pronounced good, is swept away, knocked down, chopped up, simply for the sake of change, and to show that we are wiser than our ancestors. In my young days, these good streets of London were paved with large, firm, solid lumps of granite; you could step across from stone to stone quietly, easily, and drily. They wanted little or no repair, except when some villanous water company chose to pick up the stones in order either to carry a pipe to, or cut it off from, some of the adjacent houses." "If you ever come to drive a cab or a curricle through the streets, Winkworth," said Charles Marston, "you will find it much more pleasant to roll over Mr. Macadam than over those same jolting blocks of granite you talk of." "Heaven forbid that I ever should commit such a mad action!" replied the old gentleman, still striding on with his long legs and his somewhat rounded body and shoulders, not at all unlike a hen-turkey in the moulting season; "but that which strikes me as the most curious part of the whole process is, that you people of the present day think you are advancing all the time, and call your operations progress, when, in fact, like the crab, you are going backwards. Here you have very nearly reduced the streets of London to the same state in which they were left by King Lud, whose name very appropriately rhymes to mud." "I suppose all things do go in a circle," answered Charles Marston, "like that wheel which you see turning round; yet the wheel in turning round rolls the carriage forward; and so, I suppose, the gyrations of society help on the great machine."