You do not come upon these churchyards
violently; there are shades of transition in the
neighbourhood. An antiquated news shop, or
barber's shop, apparently bereft of customers
in the earlier days of George the Third, would
warn me to look out for one, if any discoveries in
this respect were left for me to make. A very
quiet court, in combination with an unaccountable
dyer's and scourer's, would prepare me for
a churchyard. An exceedingly retiring public-house,
with a bagatelle-board shadily visible in
a sawdusty parlour shaped like an omnibus, and
with a shelf of punch-bowls in the bar, would
apprise me that I stood near consecrated ground.
A " Dairy," exhibiting in its modest window one
very little milk can and three eggs, would suggest
to me the certainty of finding the poultry hard
by, pecking at my forefathers. I first inferred
the vicinity of Saint Ghastly Grim, from a certain
air of extra repose and gloom pervading a vast
stack of warehouses.

From the hush of these places, it is congenial
to pass into the hushed resorts of business.
Down the lanes I like to see the carts and
waggons huddled together in repose, the cranes
idle, and the warehouses shut. Pausing in the
alleys behind the closed Bunks of mighty
Lombard-street, it gives one as good as a rich feeling
to think of the broad counters with a rim
along the edge, made for telling money out
on, the scales for weighing precious metals, the
ponderous ledgers, and, above all, the bright
copper shovels for shovelling gold. When I
draw money, it never seems so much money
as when it is shovelled at me out of a bright
copper shovel. I like to say " In gold," and
to see seven pounds musically pouring out of
the shovel, like seventy; the Bank appearing to
remark to me—I italicise appearing—"if you
want more of this yellow earth, we keep it in
barrows, at your service." To think of the
banker's clerk with his deft finger turning the
crisp edges of the Hundred-Pound Notes he has
taken in a fat roll out of a drawer, is again
to hear the rustling of that delicious south-cash
wind. "How will you have it?" I once heard
this usual question asked at a Bank Counter of
an elderly female, habited in mourning and
steeped in simplicity, who answered, open-eyed,
crook-fingered, laughing with expectation,
"Anyhow!" Calling these things to mind as I
stroll among the Banks, I wonder whether the
other solitary Sunday man I pass, has designs
upon the Banks. For the interest and mystery
of the matter, I almost hope he may have, and
that his confederate may be at this moment
taking impressions of the keys of the iron closets
in wax, and that a delightful robbery may be in
course of transaction. About College-hill, Mark-lane,
and so on towards the Tower, and Dock-
ward, the deserted wine-merchants' cellars are
fine subjects for consideration; but the deserted
money-cellars of the Bankers, and their plate-
cellars, and their jewel-cellars, what subterranean
regions of the Wonderful Lamp are these!
And again: possibly some shoeless boy in rags
passed through this street yesterday, for whom
it is reserved to be a Banker in the fulness of
time, and to be surpassing rich. Such reverses
have been, since the days of Whittington; and
were, long before. I want to know whether the
boy has any foreglittering of that glittering
fortune now, when he treads these stones,
hungry. Much as I also want to know whether
the next man to be hanged at Newgate yonder,
had any suspicion upon him that he was moving
steadily towards that fate, when he talked so
much about the last man who paid the same
great debt at the same small Debtors' Door.

Where are all the people who on busy working-
days pervade these scenes? The locomotive
banker's clerk, who carries a black portfolio
chained to him by a chain of steel, where is he?
Does he go to bed with his chain on—to church
with his chain on—or does he lay it by? And
if he lays it by, what becomes of his portfolio
when he is unchained for a holiday? The waste-paper
baskets of these closed counting-houses
would let me into many hints of business
matters if I had the exploration of them; and
what secrets of the heart should I discover on
the " pads" of the young clerks—the sheets of
cartridge-paper and blotting-paper interposed
between their writing and their desks! Pads
are taken into confidence on the tenderest
occasions, and oftentimes when I have made a
business visit, and have sent in my name from
the outer office, have I had it forced on my
discursive notice that the officiating young gentleman
has over and over again inscribed AMELIA,
in ink of various dates, on corners of his pad.
Indeed, the pad may be regarded as the legitimate
modern successor of the old forest-tree:
whereon these young knights (having no
attainable forest nearer than Epping) engrave
the names of their mistresses. After all, it
is a more satisfactory process than carving,
and can be oftener repeated. So these courts
in their Sunday rest are courts of Love
Omnipotent (I rejoice to bethink myself), dry as
they look. And here is Garraway's, bolted and
shuttered hard and fast! It is possible to
imagine the man who cuts the sandwiches, on his
back in a hayfield; it is possible to imagine his
desk, like the desk of a clerk at church, without
him; but imagination is unable to pursue the
men who wait at Garraway's all the week for the
men who never come. When they are forcibly put
out of Garraway's on Saturday night—which
they must be, for they never would go out of their
own accord—where do they vanish until Monday
morning? On the first Sunday that I
ever strayed here, I expected to find them
hovering about these lanes, like restless ghosts,
and trying to peep into Garraway's through
chinks in the shutters, if not endeavouring to
turn the lock of the door with false keys, picks,
and screw-drivers. But the wonder is, that
they go clean away! And now I think of it,
the wonder is, that every working-day pervader
of these scenes goes clean away. The man who
sells the dogs' collars and the little toy-
coal-scuttles, feels under as great an obligation to go
afar off, as Glyn and Co., or Smith, Payne, and