le length of it. It is just a
segment of the City, E.C.--a straggling street of flat-faced warehouses
and printing-works; high, impassive walls; gaunt, sombre, and dumb; not
one sound or spark of life to be heard or seen anywhere. Yet that is
what the unknowing think of when they think of the Italian quarter.

The true, warm heart of Italy in London is Eyre Street Hill, which slips
shyly out of one of the romantic streets of London--Clerkenwell Road.
There is something very taking about Clerkenwell Road, something snug
and cheering. It is full, clustering, and alive. Here is the Italian
Church. Here is St. John's Gate, where Goldsmith and Isaac Walton and a
host of other delightful fellows lived. This gatehouse is now all that
remains of the Priory of St. John of Jerusalem around which the little
village of Clerkenwell developed. Very near, too, are Cloth Fair,
Bartholomew's Close, Smithfield, and a hundred other echoes of past
times. And here--most exciting of all--the redoubtable Mr. Heinz (famous
for his 57 Varieties) has his warehouse.

There is a waywardness about Clerkenwell Road. It never seems quite to
know where it shall go. It drifts, winds, rises, drops, debouches. You
climb its length, and, at the top, you see a wide open space, which is
Mount Pleasant, and you think you have reached its end; but you
haven't. There is much more to come. It doesn't stop until it reaches
Gray's Inn Road, and then it stops sharply, unexpectedly. But the
romance of the place lies not only in its past; there is an immediate
romance, for which you must turn into its byways. Here live all those
bronzed street-merchants who carry delightful things to our
doors--ice-cream, roast chestnuts, roast potatoes, chopped wood, and
salt. In unsuspected warehouses here you may purchase wonderful toys
that you never saw in any other shops. You may buy a barrow and a stove
and a complete apparatus for roasting potatoes and chestnuts, including
a natty little poker for raking out the cinders. You may buy a gaudily
decorated barrow and freezing-plant for the manufacture and sale of
ice-cream. Or--and as soon as I have the money this is what I am going
to buy in Clerkenwell--you may buy a real street organ--a hundred of
them, if you wish. While the main road and the side streets on the south
are given up to the watch and clock-makers, the opposite side-streets
are Italian soil. Here are large warehouses where the poor Italian may
hire an organ for