hand
play-books. Between Marquis Court on the one hand, Russell Court on the
other, and a miserable alley called Cross Court which connects them, is
what appears at first sight to be a solid block of tenements. The
graveyard is in the very heart of this populous block. The door of one of
the houses stood open, and through a barred staircase window at the back
of the entry I caught a glimpse of a patch of grass--a sight so strange in
this part of London that I went around to the other side of the block to
examine further.

There I found the "reeking little tunnel." It is merely a stone-paved
passage about four feet wide through the ground floor of a tenement. House
doors open into it. A lamp hangs over the entrance. A rusty iron gate
closes it at the farther end. Here is the "pestiferous and obscene
churchyard," completely hemmed in by the habitations of the living. Few of
the graves are marked, and most of the tombstones remaining are set up on
end against the walls of the houses. Perhaps a church stood there once,
but there is none now. The burials are no longer permitted in this hideous
spot, the people of the block, when they shut their doors at night, shut
the dead in with them. The dishonoring of the old graves goes on briskly.
Inside the gate lay various rubbish--a woman's boot, a broken coal
scuttle, the foot of a tin candlestick, fragments of paper, sticks, bones,
straw--unmentionable abominations; and over the dismal scene a reeking,
smoke-laden fog spread darkness and moisture.

THE TEMPLE CHURCH [Footnote: From "Walks in London."]

BY AUGUSTUS J.C. HARE

By Inner Temple Lane we reach the only existing relic of the residence of
the Knights Templars in these courts, their magnificent Temple Church (St
Mary's), which fortunately just escaped the Great Fire in which most of
the Inner Temple perished. The church was restored in 1839-42 at an
expense of L70,000, but it has been ill-done, and with great disregard of
the historic memorials it contained.

It is entered by a grand Norman arch under the western porch, which will
remind those who have traveled in France of the glorious door of Loches.
This opens upon the Round Church of 1185 (fifty-eight feet in diameter),
built in recollection of the Round Church of the Holy Sepulcher, one of
the only four remaining round churches in England; the others being at
Cambridge, Northampton, and Maplestead in Essex. Hence, between graceful
groups of Purbeck marble