merrily the fountain leaped and
danced, and merrily the smiling dimples twinkled and expanded more and
more, until they broke into a laugh against the basin's rim, and
vanished." As we saw the fountain on the bright August morning of our
tramp, the few shrubs, flowers, and ferns planted round it gave it quite
a rural effect, and we wished long life to the solitary specimen of
eucalyptus, whose glaucous-green leaves and tender shoots seemed
ill-fitted to bear the nipping frosts of our variable climate.

Coming out of the Temple by Middle Temple Lane, we pass on our left
Child's Bank, the "Tellson's Bank" of _A Tale of Two Cities_, "which was
an old-fashioned place even in the year 1780," but was replaced in 1878
by the handsome building suitable to its imposing neighbours, the Law
Courts. Temple Bar, which adjoined the Old Bank, and was one of the
relics of Dickens's London, has passed away, having since been
re-erected on "Theobalds," near Waltham Cross.

"A walk down Fleet Street"--one of Dr. Johnson's enjoyments--leads us to
Whitefriars Street, on the east side of which, at No. 67, is the office
of _The Daily News_, edited by Dickens from 21 Jany. to 9 Feby., 1846,
and for which he wrote the original prospectus, and subsequently, in a
series of letters descriptive of his Italian travel, his delightful
_Pictures from Italy_. St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street is supposed
to have been that immortalized in _The Chimes_.

It was in this street many years before (in the year 1833, when he was
only twenty-one), as recorded in Forster's _Life_, that Dickens
describes himself as dropping his first literary sketch, _Mrs. Joseph
Porter over the Way_, "stealthily one evening at twilight, with fear and
trembling, into a dark letter-box in a dark office up a dark court in
Fleet Street; and he has told his agitation when it appeared in all the
glory of print:--'On which occasion I walked down to Westminster Hall,
and turned into it for half an hour, because my eyes were so dimmed with
joy and pride, that they could not bear the street, and were not fit to
be seen there.'" The "dark court" referred to was no doubt Johnson's
Court, as the printers of the _Monthly Magazine_, Messrs. Baylis and
Leighton, had their offices here. This contribution appeared in the
January number 1834 of this magazine, published by Messrs. Cochrane and
Macrone of 11 Waterloo Place.

Turning up Chancery Lane, also celebrated in many of Charles Dickens'