meet a Dandie Dinmont with the Peppers and Mustards at his heels, a Rashleigh lurking by, a Dugald Dalgetty of Drumthwacket discussing the merits of Rhenish wine and _Kirschenwasser_ with the yeomen warders. Had we lived in the Tower through the greater part of a book, as we are shut up in Loch Leven Castle with Queen Mary in _The Abbot_, we should have visited again and again the rooms and cells in which, with Roland Graeme and the Douglases, we had spent so unforgettable a time in our lives. It is true that Shakespeare lays scenes of his historical plays in the Tower, and that Scott brings Julian Peveril and Nigel within its Traitor’s Gate, for a space; but the dramatist is merely copying locality from the history books, and the novelist is so impatient with the fate that has carried two of his young men under the archway of the Bloody Tower that he cuts off his chapter with the words, “But the thoughts and occurrences of a prison are too uniform for a narrative, and we must now convey our readers into a more bustling scene.” Really, Sir Walter, this is too scant an excuse to drive us out of one of the most wonderful buildings in the world to “the spacious mansion of the Duke of Buckingham with the demesne belonging to it,” the foundations of which are now covered by the Hotel Cecil, and the “demesne” blotted out by the buildings of the Strand and the Adelphi. “The tide carried them up under a dark and lowering arch, closed at the upper end by the well-known Traitor’s Gate, formed like a wicket of huge intersecting bars of wood, through which might be seen a dim and imperfect view of soldiers and warders upon duty, and of the steep ascending causeway which leads up from the river into the interior of the fortress. By this gate--and it is the well-known circumstance which assigned its name--those accused of State crimes were usually committed to the Tower. The Thames afforded a secret and silent mode of conveyance for transporting thither such whose fallen fortunes might move the commiseration, or whose popular qualities might excite the sympathy, of the public; and even where no cause for especial secrecy existed, the peace of the city was undisturbed by the tumult attending the passage of the prisoner and his guards through the most frequented streets.” Here we have the beginning of quite an admirable Tower romance. Our hero lands at the fatal steps, and as he walks up under the Bloody Tower a handkerchief is dropped down from the window of the cell in which Archbishop Laud was imprisoned. From within that darkened room “a female voice, in a tone wherein grief and joy were indescribably mixed, exclaimed, ‘My son!--my dear son!’” We feel our plot moves quickly when the warder picks up the mysterious bit of cambric and “looks at it with the jealous minuteness of one who is accustomed to detect secret correspondence in the most trifling acts of intercourse. “‘There may be writing on it with invisible ink,’ said one of his comrades.