ome years.

Coupled in association with Dickens' reference to having played round
about during his boyhood, while living in Lant Street, and working in
Warren's Blacking Factory, only two blocks away in Villiers Street, is
also the memory of David Copperfield's strange liking for these "dark
arches." Originally these yawning crevices were constructed as a
foundation for the "Adelphi Terrace," the home of the Savage Club, and of
Garrick at one time, and now overlooking the "Embankment Gardens," though
formerly overhanging the actual river-bank itself.

What wonder that these catacomb-like vaults should have been so ghostly
reminiscent and suggestive of the terrors associated with the "Jack
Shepards" and "Jonathan Wilds," whose successors lived in Dickens' day.
One very great reality in connection with its unsavoury reputation is the
tunnel-like opening leading Strandward. Through this exit was the back
door of a notorious "Coffee and Gambling House," like enough the "little,
dirty, tumble-down public house" hard by Hungerford Stairs, where the
Micawbers located just before emigrating, and referred to by Dickens in
"David Copperfield." Through this door persons of too confiding a
disposition were lured by thieves and blacklegs, drugged, swindled, and
thrown out bodily into the darksome tunnel to recover, if they returned to
consciousness before discovered by the police, their dazed and befuddled
wits as best they might.

"The Adelphi" itself is one of those lovable backwaters of a London
artery, which has only just escaped spoliation at the hands of the
improver. A few months since it was proposed to raze and level off the
whole neighbourhood as a site for the municipal offices of the Corporation
of the County Council, but wire-pulling, influence, or what not, turned
the current in another direction, and to-day there is left in all its
original and winsome glory the famous Adelphi, planned and built by the
brothers Adam, as a sort of acropolis as a site for institutions of
learning and culture.

In Dickens' time, though the "Embankment" was taking form, it lacked many
of those adornments which to-day place it as one of the world's great
thoroughfares. Immediately opposite on the fore-shore of the river is the
Egyptian obelisk, one of the trio of which another is in the Place de la
Concord at Paris, and the other in Central Park, New York. Here it was
transferred to a new environment, and since the seventies this pictur