When Nell Gwynne looked up from that signally successful jest, she may have seen, across the street, the two houses wherein, a few years before, had dwelt the stern Protector of the Commonwealth and the husband of his daughter, Ireton. I wonder what she thought of old Noll! The houses stand there yet, substantial, square, their red brick "mellowed but not impaired by time." The "restored" Charles had had the corpses of over a hundred Puritans, including Admiral Blake's, and that of Cromwell's old mother, dug up from their graves and flung in a heap in St. Margaret's Churchyard; he had hung in chains on Tyburn gallows the disinterred clay of Cromwell, Ireton, and Bradshaw. I wonder he was not prompted to pull down these dwellings of his father's "murderers." He must have seen them often. Their windows overlooked the garden of his light-o'-love. Did _she_ intercede to have them preserved? As I linger there, I like to think so. * * * * * Still within a half-mile circle of my home, on the same Highgate Hill whereon stand the houses of Nell Gwynne and Ireton, I can show my children the "werry, indentical" milestone from which--_ita legenda scripta_--Dick Whittington was recalled by the sound of Bow Bells. At the top of Highgate Hill, and on the slope of another hill where a man (since dead in the workhouse) saved Queen Victoria's life, stands the house where Samuel Taylor Coleridge lived. Here, and, it is said, in a little inn near by, he entertained such company as Shelley, Keats, Byron, Leigh Hunt, and--surely not in the little inn?--Carlyle. Coleridge lies buried in the churchyard hard by, and in Highgate Cemetery I find the graves of George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens' daughter Dora, Tom Sayers the prize-fighter, and Lillywhite the cricketer. * * * * * Harry Lowerison has a way of teaching children by taking them to see the streets and monuments of London; and I can think of no more interesting or promising mode of instruction. For in these scenes English history is indelibly and picturesquely written, back to the date of our earliest records. I stood one day in Cannon Street, when a passing omnibus-horse chanced to slip. The vehicle swerved across the asphalt, and, to complete the catastrophe, the horse fell. Then, hey, presto! in the twinkling of an eye, the street was blocked with a compact mass of "blue carts and yellow omnibuses, varnished carriages and brown vans, green omnibuses and brown cabs, pale loads of yellow straw, rusty red iron clanking on paintless carts, high white wool packs, grey horses, bay horses, black teams; sunlight sparkling on the brass harness, gleaming from the carriage panels; jingle, jingle, jingle." A bustling, shuffling, pushing, wriggling, twisting wonder! One moment's damming of the stream had caused such a gathering as Imperial Cæsar never dreamt of.