Poor little churchyards, they are so insignificant, and many of them are even more shrunken than when Charles Dickens visited them. Thus we hear of an injunction being sought for to restrain the would-be reformer from cutting off a two-foot-wide strip of St. Martin Orgar’s ground to make a dry area behind the houses in Crooked Lane; and the Commissioners of Sewers possess the right, and sometimes use it, of curtailing a churchyard in order to widen a road. In 1884, for instance, they gave £750 for a piece at the eastern end of Allhallows’ Churchyard, London Wall. The remainder of that little ground is now a public garden, laid out in 1894 by the Metropolitan Public Gardens Association, and is a quiet resting-place in the busy thoroughfare, with a piece of the ancient City wall still existing in it. Most of the churchyards “entirely detached from churches” are the sites of the burned buildings, which were used as burial-grounds for the amalgamated parishes—for the mournful calamity of 1666 visited the churches of London with “peculiar severity,” 89 of them being destroyed, 51 of which were rebuilt by Wren and his followers, and 35 of which were not replaced. All the City churchyards are now protected from being built upon by the Disused Burial-grounds Act of 1888, but that Act has not yet been read to include the sites of the churches themselves which are from time to time removed, and which have all had interments in the vaults underneath them. The site of Allhallows’ the Great, Upper Thames Street, was recently sold to a brewery company, but has not yet been built upon, because it is thought that an injunction will be served upon the builder and that it will be made a test case.