For the quietude of the place! How cynical a reverse of fortune, that the busiest spot on the London, Oxford and Birmingham Road, where sixty coaches rolled by daily, and where innumerable post-chaises changed horses, should sink thus into slumber! The thought of such a change would, seventy years ago, have been inconceivable; just as unthinkable as that Clapham Junction of to-day should ever become a rural spot for picnics and the plucking of primroses. A curious feature in the story of “Chapel House” inn is that a small portion of the house has in recent times been rebuilt, for the better accommodation of present visitors. In the course of putting in the foundations some relics of the old chapel were unearthed, in the shape of stone coffins, bones, a silver crucifix, and some beads. When evening draws in and the last pallid light in the sky glints on the old casements of the wayside cottages of “Chapel House,” or in the dark avenue, the spot wears a solemn air, and seems to exhale Romance. London inns retired from business are, as may be supposed, comparatively few. A curious example is to be found under the shadow of St. Alban, Holborn, in “White Hart” Yard, between Gray’s Inn Road and Brooke Street. It is the last fragment of an old galleried building, presumably once the “White Hart,” but now partly occupied by a dairyman and a maker of packing-cases. Local history is silent as to the story of the place. Of all converted inns, there is probably no stranger case than that of the “Edinburgh Castle.” It is not old, nor was it really and truly, in the hearty, hospitable sense, an inn, although the landlord doubtless was included in the all-comprising and often deceptive category of “licensed victuallers,” who very generally do not victual you. The “Edinburgh Castle” was, in short, a great flaring London gin-palace in Limehouse. It has been described by a journalist addicted above his fellows to superlatives--the equivalent in literature of nips of brandy “neat”--as “one of the flashiest, most flaunting, sin-soaked dens in London,” which is just so much nonsense. It _was_, however, a public-house on a large scale, and did a big trade. It was ornate, in the vulgar, gilded public-house way, and not what can properly be styled a “den.” [Illustration: “WHITE HART” YARD.] Those curious in conversions may easily see to-day what the “Edinburgh Castle” was like, for its outward look is unchanged, and many an old frequenter, come back from foreign climes--or perhaps only from H.M. Prison on Dartmoor--shoulders his way in at the old familiar doors and calls for his “four ’arf,” or his “two o’ brandy,” before he becomes aware of the essential change that has come over the place. No more booze does he get at the “Edinburgh Castle”: only coffee, tea, or the like--which do not come under that head. The “Edinburgh Castle” has indeed been acquired by the Barnardo Homes for the “People’s Mission Church.”