Nowadays, looking eastward up the Strand, the eye is caught by the two churches of St. Mary-le-Strand and St. Clement Danes, standing isolated in the centre of the roadway, whilst the traffic roars past on either side. In the Middle Ages you would still have seen St. Clement’s, though half engulfed in a rookery of ill-smelling, crazy old timbered houses, with so narrow a passage between that coachmen called it the “Straits of St. Clement’s.” But on the site of St. Mary’s stood a maypole, one hundred feet high, dear to the heart of the city youth for the merrymakings that took place around it. Such giddy proceedings vexed the Puritans, who swept it away in an outburst of righteous indignation, but old customs die hard, and at the Restoration another and still lordlier pole was set up with royal approval, and dancing and junketings went on around it for many a long day. The church of St. Clement’s takes us back to very ancient history. Some say that beneath it lie the bones of King Harold and other Danish invaders. What is pretty certain is that the original church was built, after the expulsion of the Danes, by the few settlers who, having married English wives, chose to remain behind, on condition that they did not stir out of the strip of land that lay between the Isle of Thorney, now Westminster, and Caer Lud, now Ludgate. Travellers from all over the world who have shared the common traditions of childhood, feel a queer sense of kinship when they pass along the Strand and suddenly hear the old bells ringing out the familiar tune of “Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s.” The bells of the nursery-rhyme are not those of St. Clement Danes, but of the St. Clement’s, Eastcheap, which for centuries has been in the centre of the dried fruit trade. [Illustration: ST. CLEMENT DANES] The bells were famous even in Shakespeare’s day. “We have heard the chimes at midnight, Master Shallow,” says Falstaff in _Henry IV_. Those chimes are gone, but the present peal of ten bells, cast in 1693, is as famous for its music. One might write a whole history of church bells, from the time when Turketul, Abbot of Croyland in Lincolnshire, in the ninth century, presented his abbey with the great bell GUTHLAC, and added six others with the rhythmic names of PEGA, BEGA, BETTELIN, BARTHOMEW, TATWIN and TURKETUL, to make a peal.