e printed word, and Continental-made motors and
automobiles are driving the humble cart-horse from the city streets in no
small way.

It now only remains for the development of the project which is to
supplant the ungainly though convenient omnibus with an up-to-date service
of motor stages, when, in truth, London will have taken on very much of a
new aspect.

One of the most recent disappearances is old Holywell Street, of unsavoury
reputation, the whilom Booksellers' Row of Dickens' day, a "narrow, dirty
lane" which ran parallel with the Strand from St. Clement's-Danes to St.
Mary-le-Strand, and was occupied chiefly by vendors of books of doubtful
morality. Wych Street, too, in company with Holywell Street, has gone the
same way, in favour of the new thoroughfare which is to connect Holborn
and the Strand, an enterprise which also has made way with the Clare
Market between Lincoln's Inn Fields and the Strand, a locality well known
to, and made use of by, Dickens in "The Old Curiosity Shop."

The identical building referred to therein may be in doubt; probably it
is, in that Dickens himself repudiated or at least passed a qualifying
observation upon the "waste paper store," which popular tradition has ever
connected therewith. But one critic--be he expert or not--has connected it
somewhat closely with the literary life of the day, as being formerly
occupied by one Tessyman, a bookbinder, who was well acquainted with
Dickens, Thackeray, and Cruikshank. The literary pilgrim will give up this
most sentimental Dickens _relique_ with something of the serious pang that
one feels when his favourite idol is shattered, when the little
overhanging corner building is finally demolished, as it soon will be,
if "improvement" goes on at the pace of the last few years hereabouts.

[Illustration: THE (REPUTED) "OLD CURIOSITY SHOP."]

A drawing of this revered building has been included in the present
volume, as suggestive of its recorded literary associations.

There is no question but what it is _the relique_ of the first rank
usually associated with Dickens' London, as witness the fact that there
appears always to be some numbers of persons gazing fondly at its crazy
old walls.

The present proprietor appears to have met the demand which undoubtedly
exists, and purveys souvenirs, prints, drawings, etc., to the Dickens
admirers who throng his shop "in season" and out, and from all parts of
the globe, with the balance, as u