Hurry up, you belated ones who have not yet seen the Cheshire Cheese. It is the last of the Inns - the oldest relic of its kind in all London.

CHAPTER XIV

FLEET STREET AND ST. PAUL'S

'TOPPING my taxi, as I did, on the edge TOPPING in that

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of the decline that sweeps toward old St. Paul's, watching the rush and choke of the traffic, it was hard for me to believe that right under my wheels flowed the Fleet Ditchthe greatest of London's sewers. What goes on down below the crust of asphalt is just as well hidden from sight. The merciful rain, no doubt, helps in the cleansing, and so does the emptying of countless tubs - the Englishman being the best scrubbed biped on earth. What goes on above is in clear sight every hour of the day and night, for nobody ever goes to bed in Fleet Street. Here centre the thousand wires that bring the news of the world to as many sleepless presses, and here the rumble of delivery wagons, loaded with tons of journals, is heard from midnight to dawn.

It has always been the same story. Many of the presses of the great publishers and printers have dated back into the last century and before. The printing office of Richard Tottel, law stationers in the time of Henry VIII, pounded away here. At the angle of Chancery Lane gate Izaak Walton had his "Compleat Angler" printed. Hard by lived Drayton and Abraham Cowley, whose father was a typesetter; and Wynkyn de Worde, the famous printer whose sign was the Falcon.

Here, too, along its narrow sidewalks, the unknown Michael Angelo Titmarsh was wont to make his disheartened way from one printing office to another, in his search for a publisher; and here, within walking distance of where I sat perched up in my cab, my imagination in full play, Mr. William Makepeace Thackeray, but a few years later, corrected the proof of the pages which were then making him famous.

These earlier years had been bitter indeed to the young author. He had failed as an attorney; he had been cheated out of his patrimony by a card-sharper; he had given up all hopes of being an artist, and now, at twentysix years of age, had again started life, this time as an author, and in competition, too,

with Dickens, who was one year his junior, and who at this time (1837-8) had reached almost the zenith of his reputation.

All this was well known at the time. Macready says, in his Diary: "At Garrick Club where I dined and saw the papers. Met Thackeray, who has spent all his fortune, and is now about to settle in Paris, I believe, as an artist."

Just as I had followed him the day before into The Cock, and occupied his seat at table, so now I studied the street over which he had dragged his weary steps, wondering, among other things, whether he had stopped, as I had, to measure with his eye the swing and crush of the traffic around him; wondering, too, whether the great dome of St. Paul's, dominating the cavernous gloom of the struggling, dirtbegrimed city, had not brought him, as it did me, a note of dignity and rest. He loved it, I know, and loved to be beneath its shadow. One day, when Fields was with him, he was mentioning the various sights he had seen, when Thackeray interrupted. "But you

haven't seen the greatest one yet," he said. "Go with me to-day to St. Paul's, and hear the charity children sing." So they went, and Mr. Fields noticed that Thackeray had his

head bowed, and that his whole frame shook with emotion "as the children of poverty rose to pour out their anthem of praise."

Thackeray himself tells us about it in one of the lectures on the Georges. "Five-thousand charity children, like nosegays, and with sweet, fresh voices, sing the hymn which makes every heart thrill with praise and happiness. I have seen a hundred grand sights in the world coronations, Parisian splendours, Crystal Palace openings, Pope's chapels with their processions of long-tailed cardinals and quavering choirs of fat soprani, but thinking in all Christendom there is no such sight as Charity Children's Day. Non Angli, sed Angeli. As one looks at that beautiful multitude of innocents, as the first note strikes; indeed, one can almost fancy that cherubs are singing." And elsewhere he has written: "To see a hundred boys marshalled in a chapel or old hall; to hear their sweet, fresh voices when they chant, and look in their brave, calm faces; I say, does not the sight and sound of them smite you, somehow, with a pang of exquisite kindness."

The surge and crush is, no doubt, greater to-day than it was in Thackeray's time. The millions have pressed closer and the fight for