that
will dresse our meate, when wee can get any, as well as any greasie
scullion in Fleet Lane or Pye Corner."

At 25, Silver Street, Wood Street, is the hall of one of the smaller
City companies--the Parish Clerks of London, Westminster, Borough of
Southwark, and fifteen out parishes, with their master wardens and
fellows. This company was incorporated as early as Henry III.(1233), by
the name of the Fraternity of St. Nicholas, an ominous name, for "St.
Nicholas's clerk" was a jocose _nom de guerre_ for highwaymen. The first
hall of the fraternity stood in Bishopsgate Street, the second in Broad
Lane, in Vintry Ward. The fraternity was re-incorporated by James I. in
1611, and confirmed by Charles I. in 1636. The hall contains a few
portraits, and in a painted glass window, David playing on the harp, St.
Cecilia at the organ, &c. The parish clerks were the actors in the old
miracle plays, the parish clerks of our churches dating only from the
commencement of the Reformation. The "Bills of Mortality" were
commenced by the Parish Clerks' Company in 1592, who about 1625 were
licensed by the Star Chamber to keep a printing-press in their hall for
printing the bills, valuable for their warning of the existence or
progress of the plague. The "Weekly Bill" of the Parish Clerks has,
however, been superseded by the "Tables of Mortality in the Metropolis,"
issued weekly from the Registrar-General's Office, at Somerset House,
since July 1st, 1837. The Parish Clerks' Company neither confer the
freedom of the City, nor the hereditary freedom.

There is a large gold refinery in Wood Street, through whose doors three
tons of gold a day have been known to pass. Australian gold is here cast
into ingots, value L800 each. This gold is one carat and three quarters
above the standard, and when the first two bars of Australian gold were
sent to the Bank of England they were sent back, as their wonderful
purity excited suspicion. For refining, the gold is boiled fifteen
minutes, poured off into hand moulds 18 pounds troy weight, strewn with
ivory black, and then left to cool. You see here the stalwart men
wedging apart great bars of silver for the melting pots. The silver is
purified in a blast-furnace, and mixed with nitric acid in platinum
crucibles, that cost from L700 to L1,000 apiece. The bars of gold are
stamped with a trade-mark, and pieces are cut off each ingot to be sent
to the assayer for his report.

"I read in divers records,