The electric tramways run far out from Leicester, and in the town itself form a maze of lines that only the Leicester people themselves can readily understand. The long approach by the London road, composed as it is of the residential quarters of the wealthier classes, is the best of all the entrances, just as Belgrave, on the north, is the worst; but in the olden days this was “Gallowtree Gate,” leading uphill from the hollow in which the town stands, to the place of execution. Here you pass the Victoria Park, and so come at length to the centre of the busy place, at the Clock Tower. But in 1600 the “London Waye,” as Speed on his map of that date describes it, was the Welford Road, on the left hand, which, branching from our road at Northampton, and avoiding Harborough, came into Leicester in a mile and a half less. It led through the town by way of Highcross Street, North Bridge, and Frog Island. But Ogilby, in his _Britannia_, of seventy years later, gives the London road as now used. The Clock Tower, the centre of modern Leicester, is what the Forum was to ancient Rome. Everything centres around it. Dr. Johnson said that the tide of London life ran most strongly at Charing Cross, and even more justly it may be said that the tide of Leicester’s busy days eddies with greatest force at the Clock Tower. This is a particularly fine stone structure with spire, standing in the centre of the road where the five great thoroughfares of Gallowtree Gate, Belgrave Gate, Church Gate, Humberstone Gate, and High Street meet. It was built in 1868, as a tribute to the memory of four Leicester worthies: Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester; William of Wyggeston, the founder, in the early part of the sixteenth century, of the Wyggeston Hospital, whose money now also supports the Wyggeston Schools; Sir Thomas White, and Gabriel Newton, benefactors of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Roman Leicester centred around the site of the mediæval castle, some distance away, the Clock Tower standing outside the East Gate. [Sidenote: _RATÆ_] The antiquity of Leicester is indeed undoubted. Not only are the remains of the Romans numerous, and continually discovered in the course of building operations, but it is well known to have been the station of _Ratæ Coritanorum_, and here the Fosse Way and the so-called “Via Devana” meet. The Jewry Wall, so named from this quarter having been that part of the mediæval town where the Jewish community lived, marks the western limit of _Ratæ_. It is a mass of brickwork, with a number of arched recesses, and remains to-day the chief visible relic of old Rome. The best-received opinions hold that this is a portion of the Roman West Gate, with fragments of a temple to Janus. [Illustration: ST. NICHOLAS AND THE ROMAN WALL.]