with the British people the Romans had conquered. Then the city of
the Middle Ages, inhabited by a different race—the English race—the
little city with its gabled houses encircled by fields and woods. Next
came the city of Elizabeth’s day, richer and bigger now, with its ships
floating up to London Bridge, its beautiful “Chepe” or market-place
crowded with prosperous people.
Again she saw it a heap of ruins in Restoration days, with only a few
of its buildings remaining after the Great Fire that swept it clean.
Her next glimpse of it showed her London two hundred and fifty years
after the Fire—a different London, of broader streets, and plainer and
more healthy dwellings, with churches and public buildings, different
altogether in architecture from those of the Middle Ages, or of the
days of Elizabeth. Finally there was the London of her own day, the
huge city of streets and factories and big modern buildings, among
which there still lingered not only many rows of seventeenth-and
eighteenth-century houses and many churches and other public buildings
dating from the time when London rose from its ashes after the Great
Fire, but also buildings far, far older than these. There was the
Tower; there was Westminster Abbey; there was Westminster Hall. These
had looked down for ages upon the city by the Thames, and watched it
through its many changes from early times to the day in which Betty
herself lived.
But apart from these three ancient monuments, she could scarcely now
walk through any part of modern London without seeing something—if
only the name of a street, which recalled a memory of the Past. London
had, in fact, become for her what Godmother had once called it—the
Magic City.
_Printed in Great Britain by_ Butler & Tanner, _Frome and London_
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTE:
Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.