“Yes. Well, keep this picture of the present Whitehall in your head, because you will look upon a very different one this afternoon.”
Betty smiled in anticipation of “the magic time” that was coming. “I do wonder what London will be like in Queen Elizabeth’s day!” she exclaimed. “Do you think we shall see her? And Shakespeare too, perhaps?”
“Possibly,” said Godmother. “Here we are at home, and if you like, you may amuse yourself by looking at an old map I’ve got upstairs, made towards the end of the reign of Elizabeth. You will see that though London has grown bigger since the days of Dick Whittington, it is still full of open spaces and large gardens, even within the walls. And outside them, where now we have miles and miles of streets, it was still nearly all open country, except on the south side of the river, where you will see some interesting buildings marked.”
Betty was interested in the quaint old map, but it was one thing to look at a map, and quite another to walk in the actual streets it represented, and she longed for the afternoon.
“How shall we get back to-day?” she asked when the time came.
“There are many ways of getting into the Past,” Godmother replied. “Sometimes a single word, or the sight of a picture, or a line of poetry is the magic that will send one there in the twinkling of an eye. To-day we will try one line from a poem written by a man called William Dunbar. No one has ever praised London better than this poet, who saw the city in the sixteenth century, though about fifty years before Elizabeth came to the throne. Shut your eyes, take this book in your hand, and say after me the line with which each verse of Dunbar’s poem ends:
“London, thou art the flower of Cities all,” repeated Betty obediently....
“Now you may look!” said Godmother after a pause and as Betty’s eyes flew open, she added, “We are in the middle of the sixteenth century. Elizabeth is Queen, and here we are once more on London Bridge.”
They were standing by the tower at the entrance gate, looking towards the tower at the other end, leading into Southwark, but Betty did not at first recognize it as the same bridge on which she had stood in the Middle Ages.