lived often over their business premises in the very heart of the City itself, or, if they travelled further afield, they made their homes in suburbs like Denmark Hill, and kept on the whole to themselves. [Illustration: INTERIOR OF THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE.] The downfall of Napoleon, however, the extension of the Franchise--which for a time placed the whole power of Government in the hands of the middle class--and the prosperity of which steam power was the source in a hundred directions, began, in the reign of Queen Victoria, to break down that very real though intangible Temple Bar between the City and the West End. These factors did their work thoroughly in the end, but while the Royal Exchange was burning for the second time in 1838, the City of London had still a social side of its own, which it is difficult to-day even to imagine. Walk through the City streets at ten o’clock of the night now, and the echo of your footsteps will sound to you solitary and strange. You will pass beneath a chain of lamplights, gleaming upon empty pathways, looked down upon by lightless windows. If you could put yourself back to 1838, you would find the upper storeys noisy with the laughter and the games of children, while below, behind rep curtains, the elders sat over their port round their mahogany dinner tables. [Illustration: THE DESTRUCTION OF THE SECOND ROYAL EXCHANGE BY FIRE, 1838.] CHAPTER III. THE THIRD ROYAL EXCHANGE. It is astonishing that no one has imagined a curse of fire upon the Royal Exchange. Many a country estate has fallen under that ban with less reason. For on the night of the 10th January 1838--a night of so hard a frost that the very water from the fire engines froze in mid air--the Royal Exchange was burnt down for the second time. A letter from an eye-witness is happily on record. The fire began at night, and our witness, the son of the Rector of St. Michaels, Cornhill, then a boy of four and a half years, was awakened in his nursery by the cries of warning in the street, and the noise made in dragging the Parish fire engine from the old Watch-house beneath his windows. At this time, as our last chapter has shown us, Cornhill was not merely a street of offices open by day and empty at night. It was a street of family residences, and consequently fire in that crowded neighbourhood was more than usually terrible.