raying and eating house
Just on the spot where a little square dot
On the Bristol map marks the old Quakers' meeting-house.

A different scene it was once, I ween:
No monk is now heard his prayers repeating;
And the singers and chaunters and black gallivanters
Had never a thought of "a silent meeting."

[Illustration: "TIMES AND MIRROR" PRINTING-OFFICE, NOW PULLED DOWN.]

The streets near by, called Callowhill, Philadelphia and Penn streets,
recall the residence here of William Penn in 1697, after his marriage
with Hannah, daughter of Thomas Callowhill and granddaughter of Dennis
Hollister, prominent merchants of _Bristol_. These streets are believed
to have been laid out and named by Penn on land belonging to Hollister.
Another Friend was Richard Champion, the inventor of Bristol china and
the friend of Burke. Champion's manufactory was not commercially a
success, but his ware is now highly prized, and some few remaining
pieces of a tea-service, presented by Mr. and Mrs. Champion to Mrs.
Burke at the time the latter's husband was returned member for Bristol,
have brought thrice their weight in gold.

In Castle street, not far from Quakers' Friars, stands a profusely
ornamented mansion, now St. Peter's Hospital. The eastern portion is of
considerable antiquity: the western was rebuilt in 1608. In the
fifteenth century the older portion was the residence of Thomas Norton,
a famous alchemist, who, according to Fuller, "undid himself and all his
friends who trusted him with money, living and dying very poor about the
year 1477."[2] Norton's ill-success was, however, in his own belief, the
success of others. He declared that a merchant's wife of Bristol had
stolen from him the _elixir of life_. "Some suspect her" (says Fuller)
"to have been the wife of William Cannings, contemporary with Norton,
who started up to so great and sudden wealth--the clearest evidence of
their conjecture." The person here intended is no other than the great
Bristol merchant William Canynge the younger, who was five times mayor
and one of the rebuilders of Redcliff church. His ships, which crowded
the quays of Bristol, were a more evident source of wealth than any
cunningly devised elixir except in the eyes of a disappointed dreamer.
The reflection that in this quaint old house was enacted a history like
to that of Balthazar Claes lends to it a strange fascination.

The church of St. Mary Redcliff is, as ever, in