lothed the fair
person of a duchess have here so fallen as to be fit only for dusting
cloths. The insistent vender will assure you that they have been worn but
"werry leetle, werry leetle, indeed.... Vell, vot of it, look at the
pryshe!"

Dank and fetid boxes and barrows, to say naught of the more ambitious
shops, fill the Whitechapel Road and Petticoat Lane (now changed to
Middlesex Street, but some measure of the old activities may still be seen
of a Sunday morning).

A rummaging around will bring to light, likely enough, something that may
once have been a court dress, a bridal costume, or a ball gown; a pair of
small satin slippers, once white; a rusty crepe, a "topper of a manifestly
early vintage, or what not, all may be found here. One might almost fancy
that Pride, in some material personification, might indeed be found buried
beneath the mass of dross, or having shuffled off its last vestiges of
respectability, its corse might at least be found to have left its shroud
behind; and such these tattered habiliments really are. Rag Fair to-day is
still the great graveyard of Fashion; the last cemetery to which cast-off
clothes are borne before they enter upon another state of existence, and
are spirited into dusters and dish-clouts.

Of all modern cities, London, perhaps more than any other, is justly
celebrated for the number and variety of its suburbs.

On the northwest are Hampstead, with its noble Heath reminiscent of
"highwaymen and scoundrels," and its charming variety of landscape
scenery; and Harrow, with its famous old school, associated with the
memory of Byron, Peel, and many other eminent men, to the churchyard of
which Byron was a frequent visitor. "There is," he wrote to a friend in
after years, "a spot in the churchyard, near the footpath on the brow of
the hill looking toward Windsor, and a tomb (bearing the name of Peachey)
under a large tree, where I used to sit for hours and hours when a boy."
Nearly northward are Highgate, with its fringe of woods, and its
remarkable series of ponds; Finchley, also once celebrated for its
highwaymen, but now for its cemeteries; Hornsey, with its ivy-clad church,
and its pretty winding New River; and Barnet, with its great annual fair,
still an institution attended largely by costers and horse-traders. On the
northeast are Edmonton, with its tavern, which the readers of "John
Gilpin" will of course never forget; Enfield, where the government
manufactures rifle