d then, just as we reached the gate of Staple
Inn, she stopped and looked thoughtfully down the Gray's Inn Road.

"You have taken a great interest in our 'case,' as Doctor Thorndyke
calls it. Would you like to see the churchyard where Uncle John wished
to be buried? It is a little out of our way, but we are not in a hurry,
are we?"

I, certainly, was not. Any deviation that might prolong our walk was
welcome, and, as to the place--why, all places were alike to me if only
she were by my side. Besides, the churchyard was really of some
interest, since it was undoubtedly the "exciting cause" of the obnoxious
paragraph two of the disputed will. I accordingly expressed a desire to
make its acquaintance, and we crossed to the entrance to Gray's Inn
Road.

"Do you ever try," she asked, as we turned down the dingy thoroughfare,
"to picture to yourself familiar places as they looked a couple of
hundred years ago?"

"Yes," I answered, "and very difficult I find it. One has to manufacture
the materials for reconstruction, and then the present aspect of the
place will keep obtruding itself. But some places are easier to
reconstitute than others."

"That is what I find," said she. "Now Holborn, for example, is quite
easy to reconstruct, though I daresay the imaginary form isn't a bit
like the original. But there are fragments left, like Staple Inn and the
front of Gray's Inn; and then one has seen prints of the old Middle Row
and some of the taverns, so that one has some material with which to
help out one's imagination. But this road that we are walking in always
baffles me. It looks so old and yet is, for the most part, so new that I
find it impossible to make a satisfactory picture of its appearance,
say, when Sir Roger de Coverley might have strolled in Gray's Inn Walks,
or farther back, when Francis Bacon had chambers in the Inn."

"I imagine," said I, "that part of the difficulty is in the mixed
character of the neighbourhood. Here, on the one side, is old Gray's
Inn, not much changed since Bacon's time--his chambers are still to be
seen, I think, over the gateway; and there, on the Clerkenwell side, is
a dense and rather squalid neighbourhood which has grown up over a
region partly rural and wholly fugitive in character. Places like
Bagnigge Wells and Hockley in the Hole would not have had many buildings
that were likely to survive; and in the absence of surviving specimens
the imagination hasn't much to work from."