The five hundred years before the Conquest do not equal, in the bloody
character of their annals, the like period succeeding it. Barbarous
enough the Anglo-Saxons were, but wanton cruelty does not seem to have
been one of their traits. To produce it some access of religious fury
was usually requisite. It was on the church doors that the skins of
their Danish invaders were nailed.

[Illustration: WALTON CHURCH.]

[Illustration: KINGSTON CHURCH.]

Kingston has no more Dunstans. Alexandra would be perfectly safe in
its market-place. The rosy maidens who pervade its streets need not
envy her cheeks, and the saints and archbishops who are to officiate
at her husband's induction as head of the Anglican Church have their
anxieties at present directed to wholly different quarters. They have
foes within and foes without, but none in the palace.

Kingston bids fair to revert, after a sort, to the metropolitan
position it boasted once, but has lost for nine centuries. The capital
is coming to it, and will cover the four remaining miles within
a decade or two at the existing rate of progress. Kingston may be
assigned to the suburbs already. It is much nearer London, in point
of time, than Union Square in New York to the City Hall. A slip of
country not yet endowed with trottoirs and gas-lamps intervenes. Call
this park, as you do the square miles of such territory already deep
within the metropolis.

London's jurisdiction, as marked by the Boundary Stone, extends much
farther up the river than we have as yet gone. Nor are the swans her
only vicegerents. The myrmidons of Inspector Bucket, foot and horse,
supplement those natatory representatives. So do the municipalities
encroach upon and overspread the country, as it is eminently proper
they should, seeing that to the charters so long ago exacted, and so
long and so jealously guarded, by the towns, so much of the liberty
enjoyed by English-speaking peoples is due. Large cities may be under
some circumstances, according to an often-quoted saying, plague-spots
on the body politic, but their growth has generally been commensurate
with that of knowledge and order, and indicative of anything but a
diseased condition of the national organism.

But here we are, under the shadow of the departed Nine Elms and of
the official palace of the Odos, deep enough in Lunnon to satisfy the
proudest Cockney, in less time than we have taken in getting off that
last commonplace on political ec