hostelries, among the Golden Crosses and Bull
and Mouths, which rear their stately fronts in the improved streets of
London. If he would light upon any of these old places, he must direct
his steps to the obscurer quarters of the town, and there in some
secluded nooks he will find several, still standing with a kind of
gloomy sturdiness, amidst the modern innovations which surround them.

In the Borough especially, there still remain some half-dozen old inns,
which have preserved their external features unchanged, and which have
escaped alike the rage for public improvement and the encroachments of
private speculation. Great, rambling queer old places they are, with
galleries, and passages, and staircases, wide enough and antiquated
enough to furnish materials for a hundred ghost stories, supposing we
should ever be reduced to the lamentable necessity of inventing any,
and that the world should exist long enough to exhaust the innumerable
veracious legends connected with old London Bridge, and its adjacent
neighbourhood on the Surrey side.

It was in the yard of one of these inns--of no less celebrated a one
than the White Hart--that a man was busily employed in brushing the dirt
off a pair of boots, early on the morning succeeding the events narrated
in the last chapter. He was habited in a coarse, striped waistcoat,
with black calico sleeves, and blue glass buttons; drab breeches and
leggings. A bright red handkerchief was wound in a very loose and
unstudied style round his neck, and an old white hat was carelessly
thrown on one side of his head. There were two rows of boots before him,
one cleaned and the other dirty, and at every addition he made to the
clean row, he paused from his work, and contemplated its results with
evident satisfaction.

The yard presented none of that bustle and activity which are the usual
characteristics of a large coach inn. Three or four lumbering wagons,
each with a pile of goods beneath its ample canopy, about the height of
the second-floor window of an ordinary house, were stowed away beneath
a lofty roof which extended over one end of the yard; and another, which
was probably to commence its journey that morning, was drawn out into
the open space. A double tier of bedroom galleries, with old Clumsy
balustrades, ran round two sides of the straggling area, and a double
row of bells to correspond, sheltered from the weather by a little
sloping roof, hung over the door leading to the