doorstep. Whilst we stood there a big boat moved out into mid-stream, making a stately course through the smoke-veiled sunset towards where the Tower Bridge was opening its portals with a welcome to the high seas beyond. As the vessel neared the bridge, it was as if the artist who was painting the picture had touched it here and there with the point of a luminous pencil. The pencil travelled along the blackened wharves, dotting them with pin-pricks of light, and the men on the barges and boats below began to hang out their lanthorns. It was an epic, this passing of the ship through the gates of Old Father Thames. The lights shone out to give it good speed, and the smouldering fires of sunset followed in its wake. The majesty of the scene filled one with a sense of elation, and I said to myself, "It is not for nothing that London is called 'the Heart of the Empire'". Mrs. Darling asked me if it was true that houses were built on old London Bridge, and I quoted the description of the place by a contemporary writer: "The _street_," he says, "was dark, narrow, and dangerous, the houses overhanging the road so as to almost shut out the daylight," adding the information that "arches of timber crossed the street to keep the shaky old tenements from falling on each other." "London Bridge," declared an old proverb, "was made for wise men to go over and fools to go under," but when one reads such statements as "in 1401 another house on the bridge fell down, drowning five of its inhabitants," it occurs to one that there was almost as much danger overhead as below, where fifty watermen were computed to be drowned every year. What a picture those old records paint! There can be no pictures like it in the London of to-day. Add the ghastly touch of a row of rotting heads spiked on the battlements, and you are set wondering anew at the weird psychology of the dark ages. I told Mrs. D. the story of Sir Thomas More's head, which his daughter bribed a man to remove from the spike on the bridge and drop into a boat below where she sat, and the old lady said, "It must 'ave bin a good shot". The person responsible for Mrs. D.'s anatomy left out the bump of reverence; sentiment is also foreign to her composition, whilst her scepticism of anything she cannot actually see and touch is a deeply ingrained quality. Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII, Charles II, the Christian martyrs, are, in her estimation, to be taken with a grain of salt. She makes no distinction between them and "'Amblet" or the creations of Bunyan's brain. Tradition is a dead letter to her, and although she takes a marked interest in the Plague and the Great Fire, I have a suspicion if she were asked to "have a bit" on the actuality of those happenings, she would lay odds for, with a sensation of risk.