a ghost
on her way from the empty house to the empty church. When the bells
leave off silence falls again, there is no one in the street. One's
own footsteps echo from the wall; we walk along in a dream; old words
and old rhymes crowd into the brain. It is a dead City--a City newly
dead--we are gazing upon the dead.

Life and thought have gone away
Side by side.
All within is dark as night.
In the windows is no light;
And no murmur at the door
So frequent on its hinge before.

Silence everywhere. The blinds are down in every window of the tall
stack of offices, the doors are all closed, if there are shutters they
are up, there are no carte in the streets, no porters carry burdens,
there are no wheelbarrows, there is no more work done of any kind or
sort. Even the taverns and the eating-shops are shut--no one is
thinking of work. To-morrow--Monday--poverty will lift again his cruel
arm, and drive the world to work with crack of whip. The needle-woman
will appear again with her bundle of work; the porters, the packers,
the carmen, the clerks, the merchants themselves will all come
back--the vast army of those who earn their daily bread in the City
will troop back again. But as for to-day, nobody works; we are all at
rest; we are at peace; we are taking holiday.

This is the day--this is the time--for those who would study the City
and its monuments. It is only on this day, and at this time, that the
churches are all open. It is only on this day, and at this time, that
a man may wander at his ease and find out how the history of the past
is illustrated by the names of the streets, by the houses and the
sites, and by the few old things which still remain, even by the old
things, names and all, which have perished. The area of the City is
small; its widest part, from Blackfriars to the Tower, is but a single
mile in length, and its greatest depth is no more that half a mile But
it is so crowded and crammed full of sites sacred to this or that
memory of its long life of two thousand busy years, there is so much
to think of in every street, that a pilgrim may spend all his Sunday
mornings for years and never get to the end of London City. I should
hardly like to say how many Sunday mornings I have myself spent in
wandering about the City, Yet I can never go into it without making
some new discovery. Only last week, for instance, I discovered in the
very midst of the City, in its most crowded part, nothing