He was not a model of symmetry or beauty, but Mrs. Darling promptly annexed him as she had annexed the old pensioner of the sagging trousers and slouched hat, and somewhere in the lumber-room of the old lady's memory the Fat Boy took his place with Charles II, the aforesaid old pensioner, and Samuel Pepys, to whom she invariably refers as "that saucy ole man with the curls". The fact that the Great Fire broke out at the king's baker's in Pudding Lane and ended at Pie Corner struck her as something more than a coincidence. It was all very well for people to talk about "chance," _she_ didn't believe in chance. The very fact of the coincidence of names suggested, to _her_ mind, a well-thought-out plan. She would have sympathised with the Rev. Samuel Vincent, who, writing at the time, said, "This doth smell of a Popish design, hatcht in the same place where the Gunpowder Plot was contrived". By the way, I never think of the Great Fire without remembering the description of an eyewitness of the burning of Guild Hall: "And amongst other things that night, the sight of Guildhall was a fearful spectacle, which stood, the whole body of it together, in view for several hours together, after the fire had taken it, without flames (I suppose because the timber was such solid oak), like a bright shining coal, as if it had been a palace of gold, or a great building of burnished brass". You won't beat that for a bit of word painting. We walked on through the Old Bailey and into Fleet Street, where Shoe Lane reminded me of the fact that the man who was responsible for the phrase, "Before you could say Jack Robinson," was a tobacconist named Herdom, who lived at 98 Shoe Lane some hundred years ago. The following verse is ascribed to him:-- Says the lady, says she, "I've changed my state." "Why, you don't mean," says Jack, "that you've got a mate? You know you promised me". Says she, "I couldn't wait, For no tidings could I gain of you, Jack Robinson, And somebody one day came to me and said That somebody else had somewhere read, In some newspaper, that you were somewhere dead". "I've not been dead at all," says Jack Robinson, the pathetic naïveté of which statement marks the simple sailorman. Richard Lovelace, the Cavalier poet, who lives in the lines-- I could not love thee, dear, so much, Lov'd I not honour more, together with-- Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage, died in Gunpowder Alley, Shoe Lane, and I wondered whether the Alley still existed under that name. It did not take many minutes to find out. Yes, there it was, just at the top on the left-hand side, but no trace of poor Lovelace--nothing but new offices, one or two dingy little shops, and the patient thump, thump, of printing presses.