There are many things of interest in the gatehouse that make the trouble of writing to the secretary of the Order for permission to see them worth while. There are relics from Malta and Rhodes, an Elizabethan chimneypiece in the chancery, and other souvenirs, but the coffer that contains these treasures is more interesting than anything it holds, and that every passer-by may see. THE CHARTERHOUSE “I never think of London, which I love, without thinking of that palace which David built for Bathsheba.”--LOWELL. Coming back to Charterhouse Street and turning to the left, five minutes’ walk will bring you to Charterhouse Square, where you can find one of the most lovely and gracious things in all London. People often bewail the passing of old London without knowing that within this short distance from Holborn Circus they can see a perfect specimen of a sixteenth-century nobleman’s house. There it stands, only needing the addition of a little furniture of the period, that [Illustration: Sᵗ. John’s Gate Clerkenwell Residence of Edward Cave] would never be missed from South Kensington Museum, and you could see exactly how my Lord Howard lived when he entertained--and plotted against--his royal mistress three hundred years ago. One does not like to think of the number of people who leave London without ever having seen the Charterhouse. It is one of the most beautiful places in all London, and its story is packed with romance, intrigue, adventure and benevolence. The tale falls into three parts. It is begun by that gallant Hainaulter, Sir Walter de Manny, as the English called Walter, Lord of Mausny near Valenciennes, who came over to England in the train of Philippa of Hainault. According to Froissart he was a “very gentil parfyte knighte,” and when he saw the ghastly heaps of dead bodies of plague-stricken people lying in the streets in 1349, he bought from St. Bartholomew’s Hospital a piece of land called No Man’s Land and caused the dead to be decently buried there. Their bodies at rest, he had thought for their souls, and on March 25, 1349, he laid the foundation-stone of a chapel where the relations might pray for their dead. Twenty years later Sir Walter Manny laid another stone, that of the first cell for the Carthusian monks he brought over from France. The wives and sisters of the dead had prayed so long in the chapel that the right could not be taken from them, so for once the strict Carthusian rule was relaxed and a special place was set apart for the womenkind to come and pray.