dagger; maces with spiked heads, that only a mighty man could swing;
swords such as that with which Coeur-de-Lion could slice through such
a mace as though it were no more than a carrot--sinuous blades that
Saladin loved, that would sever a down cushion flung in the air.
Daggers and poignards, too, of every age, needle-pointed yet viciously
strong, with exquisitely inlaid hilts and fine-lined blades; long
rapiers that brought visions of gallants with curls and lace stocks
and silken hose, as ready to fight as to dance or to make a poem to a
fair lady's eyebrow. Helmets of every age, with visors behind which
the knights of old had looked grimly as they charged down the lists at
"gentle and joyous passages of arms." Horse-armour of amazing
weight--"I always pictured those old knights prancing out on a
thirteen-stone hack, but you'd want a Suffolk Punch to carry that
ironmongery!" said Wally. So through room after room, each full of
brave ghosts of the past, looking benevolently at the tall
boy-soldiers from the New World; until at length came closing-time,
and they went out reluctantly, across the flagged yard where poor
young Anne Boleyn laid her gentle head on the block; where the ravens
hop and caw to-day as their ancestors did in the sixteenth century
when she walked across from her grim prison that still bears on its
wall a scrawled "Anne." A dull little prison-room, it must have been,
after the glitter and pomp of castles and palaces--with only the
rugged walls of the Tower Yard to look upon from the tiny window.

"And she must have had such a jolly good time at first," said Wally.
"Old Henry VIII was very keen on her, wasn't he? And then she was
only his second wife--by the time he'd had six they must have begun to
feel themselves rather two-a-penny!"

They found a 'bus that took them by devious ways through the City; the
part of London that many Londoners never see, since it is another
world from the world of Bond Street and Oxford Street, with their
newness and their glittering shops. But to the queer folk who come
from overseas, it is the real London, and they wander in its narrow
streets and link fingers with the past. Old names look down from the
smoke-grimed walls: Black Friars and White Friars, Bread Street, St.
Martin's Lane, Leadenhall Street, Temple Bar: the hurrying crowd of
to-day fades, and instead come ghosts of armed men and of
leather-jerkined 'prentices, less ready to work than to fight; o