To ring the bells of London Town.”
Never again could Betty think of London as a dull, dreary place, for though she continued to forget how she actually got back into the Past, she kept a picture in her mind of London through the ages.
There was the Roman city, with its fortress and its market-place filled 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:
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.