h of these valleys a stream ran
down to the Thames. Where are they now? Some of them are
underground--arched over, built over, buried in the dark, out of sight.
Look at the map on p. 11; there you will find one of these rivers,
which ran from the Highgate Woods southward to the Thames. It was
called the Fleet, and has given its name to Fleet Street.

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[Illustration: NO. 3. IN WESTMINSTER ABBEY: THE TOMB OF EDWARD THE
CONFESSOR WITH ITS VELVET COVERING _See pages_ 17 _and_ 22]

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There were also some low hills quite close to the north bank of the
river. Let us fancy that we have gone back through the ages, many
hundreds of years before ever the Romans came to this country, and that
we are standing--you and I--facing the river on one of those hills,
that on which St. Paul's now stands. What do we see? To our right,
under its steep clay bank, so high it is almost a cliff, the Fleet runs
on its way to the Thames; to our left is the hill; behind us, {9} all
the way up to the hills of Hampstead, are tangled forests, and in the
low ground are wide marshes; and in front is the river. It is
low-water; on either side of the stream are great stretches of mud and
sand, wet marshy places, such as you may have seen at some place by the
sea where the shore is very flat and the tide goes out very far.
Beyond the marsh, on the southern shore, I think there is a wide
shallow lake, for to this day some of the land there is below the level
of the river at high-water. As we watch, look! a little rippling wave
runs over the flats between the sand-banks; the tide has turned,--how
fast it rises, how far it spreads! Before long the wide waste before
us is covered with grey waters; it has become a great lake or sea.
Nowadays embankments, such as you see in picture 1, keep the river in
its place; but in the long-ago times of which we are thinking every
high tide must have spread far and wide over what is now dry land.

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[Illustration: NO. 4. THE FIRST CORONATION IN THE ABBEY _See page_ 21]

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Could any people have wished to live in such a watery place? Yes,
indeed they did; and under the bed of the Fleet River, near its mouth,
traces have been found o