uckingham, and you have
seen, for the second time in two days, that lions are harmless before
my weapons. Then, too, I can find my friends easiest in this
direction, for the River Thames runs through this place you call the
Camp of the Lions, and it is farther down the Thames that my friends
are awaiting me. Do you not dare come with me?"

"I dare follow wherever you lead," she answered simply.

And so I turned and passed beneath the great arch into the city of
London.

5

As we entered deeper into what had once been the city, the evidences of
man's past occupancy became more frequent. For a mile from the arch
there was only a riot of weeds and undergrowth and trees covering small
mounds and little hillocks that, I was sure, were formed of the ruins
of stately buildings of the dead past.

But presently we came upon a district where shattered walls still
raised their crumbling tops in sad silence above the grass-grown
sepulchers of their fallen fellows. Softened and mellowed by ancient
ivy stood these sentinels of sorrow, their scarred faces still
revealing the rents and gashes of shrapnel and of bomb.

Contrary to our expectations, we found little indication that lions in
any great numbers laired in this part of ancient London. Well-worn
pathways, molded by padded paws, led through the cavernous windows or
doorways of a few of the ruins we passed, and once we saw the savage
face of a great, black-maned lion scowling down upon us from a
shattered stone balcony.

We followed down the bank of the Thames after we came upon it. I was
anxious to look with my own eyes upon the famous bridge, and I guessed,
too, that the river would lead me into the part of London where stood
Westminster Abbey and the Tower.

Realizing that the section through which we had been passing was
doubtless outlying, and therefore not so built up with large structures
as the more centrally located part of the old town, I felt sure that
farther down the river I should find the ruins larger. The bridge
would be there in part, at least, and so would remain the walls of many
of the great edifices of the past. There would be no such complete
ruin of large structures as I had seen among the smaller buildings.

But when I had come to that part of the city which I judged to have
contained the relics I sought I found havoc that had been wrought there
even greater than elsewhere.

At one point upon the bosom of the Thames there rises a