THE LONDON STONE.
Far up the river to the left the queerly shaped toy turrets and massive ramparts and quadrangles of the Tower broke through the morning haze in shapely and artistic masses, and at the back of the green spot of grass which surmounts Tower Hill, the square, solid, and substantial looking Mint showed where Her Majesty's sworn servants were already at work employed in making counterfeit presentments of her features for circulation in trade and commerce. The Norman tower and flanking buttresses of St. Saviour's, Southwark, next came in range, followed by the long oval glass roof of the Eastern Railway Terminus, facing Cannon street, where is erected London Stone, upon which Jack Cade sat in triumph before the dirty, noisy, rabble, which had followed his fortunes; and now I can see Guy's Hospital with its hundred windows, the Corinthian Royal Exchange in Cornhill, the massive Guildhall where many a bloated Britisher has fed on the fat of the land; the Mansion House in which the Lord Mayor occasionally does petty offenders the honor of sentencing them to the Bridewell; and now the view enlarges to the southward, and the eye takes in the fine Holborn Viaduct, lately honored by the Queen's presence; Barclay and Perkin's massive caravanserai for the brewing of beer, and the gray stones of St. Sepulchre's where the passing bell is always tolled for the condemned Newgate prisoner just before execution. The square, gray blocks of this fortress of crime gloom in an unpitying way below me, and there now is the court yard of Christ's Hospital with the gowned and bare headed school lads at their morning game of foot ball, and their shouts peal upward, even up as high as the dome of St. Paul's, like the chimes of merry music. The great piles of Somerset house and the Custom House frown down on the busy river, and the sound of the bell of St. Clement Dane's in the Strand, striking six o'clock, mingles with the mighty thunder whirr of the incoming train from Dover, which dashes like a demon over the Charing Cross bridge and into its station. Structure after structure rises on the retina, the Treasury Buildings and Horse Guards in Parliament street, Marlborough House, the British Museum, Buckingham Palace, the University College, the Nelson and York Monuments, the splendid club houses in Pall Mall and St. James; Apsley House and Hyde Park with its lakes of silvery water, Westminster Abbey, the Clock and Victoria Towers surmounting the Parliament Houses which overhang the Thames, Lambeth Palace, the residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Chief Dignitary of the English State Church and Milbank Penitentiary down in dusty Westminster, and by the way this prison with its eight towers looks like a cruet stand and its towers certainly represent the caster bottles. With its parterre of trees in the central square, the quadrangles of Chelsea Hospital, and the dome of the Palm House in Kensington Garden next come under inspection, and finally I became weary in endeavoring to pierce the haze which the sun had broken into annoying fragments, and failing to penetrate farther than Vauxhall bridge, I give up the task and draw in my head after a last look at the Catherine and West India docks, bewildered and confused by the very immensity of wealth and population which is centered and aggregated below, under and in the shadow of St. Paul's, the Mother Church of Great Britain.
"THANK YOU, SIR."
The verger says with a weak and wheezy voice:
"This is a werry great city, sir. They do say as how there's more nor three millions of hooman beings in this 'ere metropolis, and how they all gets a living is a blessed puzzle to me. I gets an occasional sixpence, and Americans seem to be more generous than any other visitors. Thank you, sir."
London is a wonderful city in many ways. The year 1866 brought the number of the inhabitants to the total of 3,186,000. This is a population larger than that of Pekin, and as large and a half as that of London's great rival, Paris. It has a greater number of edifices devoted to religious worship than the Eternal City, Rome. Its commerce exceeds that of New York, Glasgow, Cork, Havre, and Bremen in gross. It sends abroad missionaries of all known sects, to convert the heathen and blackamoor, and for them and their wives there is a larger amount of money collected in London than could by any possibility be subscribed in all the other great cities of the world combined for a like purpose. It numbers among its population more prostitutes and unfortunate females than Paris, there being according to a calculation made by a former bishop of Oxford, 30,000 of this wretched class, alone, who are strictly professionals.
London has work houses to accommodate 150,000 paupers under the parochial system, for which the residents or freeholders of every parish in the metropolitan district are taxed at an annual rate of fourteen pounds ten shillings per pauper, and yet men, women, and children die of starvation, weekly, in the slums of St. Giles, Saffron Hill, Bethnal Green, and Shoreditch.