him. In his rejected
state, he felt that it was pleasant to earn gratitude even from so
humble a being as the Peckovers' drudge.

His workshop, it has been mentioned, was in St. John's Square. Of all
areas in London thus defined, this Square of St. John is probably the
most irregular in outline. It is cut in two by Clerkenwell Road, and
the buildings which compose it form such a number of recesses, of
abortive streets, of shadowed alleys, that from no point of the Square
can anything like a general view of its totality be obtained. The exit
from it on the south side is by St. John's Lane, at the entrance to
which stands a survival from a buried world--the embattled and windowed
archway which is all that remains above ground of the great Priory of
St. John of Jerusalem. Here dwelt the Knights Hospitallers, in days
when Clerkenwell was a rural parish, distant by a long stretch of green
country from the walls of London. But other and nearer memories are
revived by St. John's Arch. In the rooms above the gateway dwelt, a
hundred and fifty years ago, one Edward Cave, publisher of the
_Gentleman's Magazine_, and there many a time has sat a journeyman
author of his, by name Samuel Johnson, too often _impransus_. There it
was that the said Samuel once had his dinner handed to him behind a
screen, because of his unpresentable costume, when Cave was
entertaining an aristocratic guest. In the course of the meal, the
guest happened to speak with interest of something he had recently read
by an obscure Mr. Johnson; whereat there was joy behind the screen, and
probably increased appreciation of the unwonted dinner. After a walk
amid the squalid and toil-infested ways of Clerkenwell, it impresses
one strangely to come upon this monument of old time. The archway has a
sad, worn, grimy aspect. So closely is it packed in among buildings
which suggest nothing but the sordid struggle for existence, that it
looks depressed, ashamed, tainted by the ignobleness of its
surroundings. The wonder is that it has not been swept away, in
obedience to the great law of traffic and the spirit of the time.

St. John's Arch had a place in Sidney Kirkwood's earliest memories.
From the window of his present workshop he could see its grey
battlements, and they reminded him of the days when, as a lad just
beginning to put questions about the surprising world in which he found
himself, he used to listen to such stories as his father could tell him
of the hi