ly to little Londoners,
but to other children as well, to examine some of the old London
names, and see what stories they can tell.

Naturally the most interesting names of all are to be found in what we
now call "the City," meaning the centre of London, which was at one
time all the London there was.

We have seen that London was in the time of the Britons just a fort,
and that it became important in Roman times, and a town grew up around
it. But this town in the Middle Ages, and even so late as the
eighteenth century, was not at all like the London we know to-day.
London now is really a county, and stretches away far into four
counties; but mediaeval London was like a small country town, though a
very important and gay and busy town, because it was the capital.

Many of the names in the City take us back to the very earliest days
of the capital. This part of London stands on slightly rising ground,
and near the river Thames, just the sort of ground which early people
would choose upon which to build a fortress or a village. The names of
two of the chief City streets, the Strand and Fleet Street, help to
show us something of what London was like in its earliest days. A few
years ago, in a famous case in a court of law, one of the lawyers
asked a witness what he was doing in the Strand at a certain time. The
witness, a witty Irishman, answered with a solemn face, "Picking
seaweed." Everybody laughed, because the idea of picking seaweed in
the very centre of London was so funny. But a strand _is_ a shore, and
when the name was given to the London _Strand_ it was not a paved
street at all, but the muddy shore of the river Thames.

Then _Fleet Street_ marks the path by which the little river Fleet ran
into the Thames. The river had several tributaries, which were covered
over in this way, and several of them are used as sewers to carry away
the sewage of the city. There is a _Fleet Street_, too, in Hampstead,
in the north-west of London, and this marks the beginning of the
course of the same little river Fleet which got its water from the
high ground of Hampstead.

This river has given us still another famous London name. It flowed
past what is now called King's Cross, and here its banks were so steep
that it was called _Hollow_, or _Hole-bourne_, and from this we get
the name _Holborn_.

The City being the centre of London had a certain amount of trading
and bargaining from the earliest times. In those times there