Those curious in the byways of Dickens topography will find Alderbury three miles from Salisbury, on the left-hand side of the Southampton road. Half a mile from it, on the other side of the way, stands “St. Mary’s Grange,” a red-brick building in a mixed Georgian and Gothic style, built by Pugin, and locally reputed to be the original of Mr. Pecksniff’s residence: a circumstance which may well give us pause and opportunity for considering whether Dickens had that distinguished architect in his mind when creating the character of his holy humbug. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE “GREEN DRAGON,” ALDERBURY.] The “Green Dragon,” which we have thus shown to have, at the least of it, as good a title as the “George” at Amesbury to be considered the original of the house kept by the genial Mrs. Lupin, friend of Tom Pinch, Mark Tapley, and Martin Chuzzlewit in particular, and of her fellow-creatures in general, does not directly face the highway, but is set back from it at an angle, behind a little patch of grass. It is pre-eminently rustic, and is even more ancient than the casual wayfarer, judging merely from its exterior, would suppose; for a fine fifteenth-century carved stone fireplace in what is now the bar parlour bears witness to an existence almost mediæval. It is a beautiful, though dilapidated, work of Gothic art of the Early Tudor period, ornamented with boldly carved crockets, heraldic roses, and shields of arms, and is worthy of inspection for itself alone, quite irrespective of its literary interest. A London inn intimately associated with _Martin Chuzzlewit_ finally disappeared in the early part of 1904, when the last vestiges of the “Black Bull,” Holborn, were demolished. The “Black Bull,” in common with the numerous other old inns of Holborn, in these last few years all swept away, stood just outside the City of London, and was originally, like its neighbours, established for the accommodation of those travellers who, in the Middle Ages, arrived too late in the evening to enter the City. At sundown the gates of the walled City of London were closed, and, unless the traveller was a very privileged person indeed, he found no entrance until the next morning, and was obliged to put up at one of the many hostelries that sprang up outside and found their account in the multitude of such laggards by the way. The old “Black Bull,” after many alterations, was rebuilt in a very commonplace style in 1825, and in later years it became a merely sordid public-house, with an unlovely pile of peculiarly grim “model” dwellings in the courtyard. In spite of those later changes, the great plaster effigy of the Black Bull himself, with a golden girdle about his middle, remained on his bracket over the first floor window until the house was pulled down, May 18th, 1904. [Illustration: SIGN OF THE “BLACK BULL,” HOLBORN.]