The Project Gutenberg EBook of Stories of London, by E. L. Hoskyn

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Title: Stories of London

Author: E. L. Hoskyn

Release Date: September 3, 2010 [EBook #33613]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STORIES OF LONDON ***

Produced by Al Haines

[Frontispiece: NO. 1. AN OLD RIVER-WALL OR EMBANKMENT (CHELSEA) _See
page_ 9]

STORIES OF

LONDON

BY

E. L. HOSKYN, B.A. (LOND.)

AUTHOR OF "PICTURES OF BRITISH HISTORY," ETC.

WITH A PREFACE BY

SOPHIE BRYANT, D.Sc., LITT.D.

[Illustration: Title page logo]

LONDON

ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK

1914

{3}

PREFACE

There are many kinds of ignorance which, for lack of time and
opportunity, we may rightly tolerate in ourselves. Ignorance of the
stories that cling around and beautify the home-place is not one of
these. A place, indeed, is not a home unless human life has woven a
thread of story through and through it. Happy are those who dwell as
children in a place well clad with racy memories and legendary lore.
The city-home of the London child is just such a place. Here we have a
city with an old old history losing itself in the mists of time, and
preserving itself in the memorials of its ancient sites and the tales
that grow like ivy round its odd place-names. Of all this the careless
city-dweller takes no note, but the London child should be a different
kind of being. London stories are racy of London; they reflect its
life in every age; and the London child is heir to them all.

The stories of London in this little book are interesting to everybody,
whether young or old; they cannot fail to be so, because London is
interesting, more or less, to everybody in the world. But the book is
written more particularly for the children of London, so that they may
not be careless city-dwellers, as so many are, but may grow up into
real citizens of this great London, loving their old city in all its
nooks and corners for its own dear sake, feeling it in all the twists
and turns of its varied history, as if their life and its life were
bound up in one.

But this is not all that the study of Lond