Alas, the Crooked Billet, at the eastern extremity of Tower Hill, has nothing left of its former magnificence. The panelled walls and carved chimney-pieces have been ruthlessly taken away,--some say to that bourne overseas whither pass so many treasures of the Old World it affects to despise. There is nothing left but the sordid dirty rooms of slum tenements, with here and there the remains of a fine ceiling and a few wall cupboards. The old building that was once a royal palace, and since the days of Henry VIII. has been a lordly inn, has fallen into the state of drab degradation that is the forerunner of the pick and shovel of the _démolisseur_. Only the rich façade remains to remind the passer-by of its vanished glories! THE TOWER Having wandered so long in its neighbourhood, let me hurriedly make the shamefaced confession that I share Richard III.’s opinion about the Tower and that I have never seen it. I have skirted it, I have gazed into its asphalted moat, I have looked with awe on its battlemented towers,--but I have never crossed the drawbridge. [Illustration: THE TOWER OF LONDON] To me it is the storehouse of mistakes--a place redolent with the memory of bygone blunders--where the great men of the nation, like Sir Thomas More, Archbishop Cranmer and Sir Walter Raleigh, and innocent, beautiful things like the little Princes and Lady Jane Grey, were done to death. There must surely be left something of Lady Jane’s agony when she saw the headless body of her young husband carried past her on the morning when she knew that she too was to die--something of the sickening sense of injustice that great men like Raleigh and More must have felt as their doom approached. Of course, for less squeamish people there is an unending interest in the historical and architectural features of the Tower. It is open every week-day from ten to six in summer and ten to five in winter, and on Saturdays the fees to the White Tower and the Jewel House are not necessary. It is staffed by a constable, a lieutenant, a resident governor and about 100 yeomen warders called Beefeaters, all of which information, as well as the fact that the best way to reach it is from Mark Lane station on the Underground, is writ large in Mr. Muirhead’s excellent Blue Book on London. Writ more small are tales that almost make me want to go and see for myself the place where Charles d’Orleans, the royal French poet, who wrote such haunting songs as “Dieu qu’il la fait bon regarder,” was held a prisoner for fifteen long years. Other things it seems besides murders happened in the Tower,--Henry the Eighth made two of his marriages here, James the First lived here for a time (a fact that does not mitigate my distaste for the Tower), and [Illustration: TRAITOR’S GATE, TOWER OF LONDON North or Inside View of Traitor’s Gate being the principal entrance of the Tower of London from the River and through which stole prisoners of rank and dignity were formerly conveyed to the Tower]