The oak-panelled, seventeenth century parlour where a man sits drinking by candle-light sets one speculating. There are his gloves on the table and his pipe, which he has removed from his pocket. His wife has filled his glass with wine, and stands telling him what has been happening during his absence. He sits back in his chair, too intent on her news to fill his pipe or lift the glass to his lips. The Great Fire, perhaps, is raging at that very moment, and the wife may be telling her husband that three hundred houses are already burnt, and how the churches were all filled with goods and people. Or maybe it is of the outbreak of the plague which the man learns, and the fear of which makes him forget his pipe and the wine poured out at his elbow. Every time I go to the London Museum I visit the pair, and always they are carrying on that same conversation. The woman's dress gets dustier and dustier, and the wine in the glass does not grow less. People come and stare and go away, leaving the couple unmoved. Is it my fancy, that when _I_ come, the conversation in that oak-panelled room becomes more tense, and if only I stayed long enough I should discover what it was about? In the model of old London Bridge Mrs. D. found something with which she is now familiar, and my character for veracity with her went up by leaps and bounds. The spiked heads on the battlements might have belonged to objectionable relatives, with such satisfaction did she greet them. The model of the old bridge clothed the dry bones of the past with flesh, and Mrs. D., as a student of history, got a move on. One can sympathise with her scepticism when one looks across at Bankside with its gabled houses sleeping in the sunlight, and the glimpse of a white country road shaded by green trees. That, Bankside! Surely, never! I did not voice the thought, not wishing to quench the flax of the old lady's newly acquired faith.