Where is this lovely place now? It is gone. On its site are some branches of the Army and Navy Stores. Think what a city loses by the destruction of such a place! The daily object-lesson in our duty to the friendless and the helpless; the memory of bygone worthies; the sentiment of brotherhood. That is one way of considering the loss. Another way is to think of it as a place of singular beauty, of such beauty as we cannot possibly reproduce. And we have willfully and needlessly destroyed it! It is a national disaster of the gravest, the most irreparable kind, that such monuments as old almshouses, old City churches, old schools, old gates, old foundations of any kind, should be given over to any body of men, with permission to tear down and destroy at their will, and under pretense of benefiting the parish. Can one benefit a man by destroying his memory? Can one [Illustration: GREY COAT HOSPITAL: THE ENTRANCE.] improve a parish by cutting off its connection with the past? [Illustration: GREY COAT BOY. GREY COAT GIRL. FROM THE STATUE IN FRONT OF THE HOSPITAL.] There is one other endowed school not yet destroyed. It is the Blue Coat School, first opened in 1688 for boys. In the year 1709 the present school buildings were erected. They consist of a charming red-brick hall with the figure of a scholar over the porch; a little garden full of greenery is at the back; at one side is the master’s residence, a two-storied house covered all over with a curtain of Virginia creeper; another little garden, full of such flowers as will grow in the London air, is behind this house. But master and boys, when they look around them, begin to tremble, for their place is old, it is beautiful, it adorns the street, it is sacred to the memory of two hundred years of Boy--thirty generations of Boy. It is still most useful--therefore one feels certain that it is doomed; it must soon go, to make room for residential flats and mansions fifteen stories high; it must, we have no doubt, follow the other monuments of the Past, and be absorbed into Consolidated Schools. If there were any other reason wanted for the destruction of the School, it is the tradition that Wren built it. [Illustration: GREY COAT HOSPITAL FROM THE GARDEN.]