Our good Colonel had luckily to look forward to a more pleasant meeting with his son, than that unfortunate interview with his other near relatives. He dismissed his cab at Ludgate Hill, and walked thence by the dismal¹ precincts of Newgate, and across the muddy pavement of Smithfield, on his way back to the old school where his son was, a way which he had trodden many a time in his own early days. There was Cistercian Street, and the Red Cow of his youth: there was the quaint² old Grey Friars Square, with its blackened trees and garden, surrounded by ancient houses of the build of the last century, now slumbering³ like pensioners⁵ in the sunshine.

Under the great archway of the hospital he could look at the old Gothic building: and a black-gowned pensioner⁴ or two crawling over the quiet square, or passing from one dark arch to another. The boarding-houses of the school were situated⁷ in the square, hard by the more ancient buildings of the hospital. A great noise of shouting, crying, clapping forms and cupboards, treble voices, bass⁸ voices, poured out of the schoolboys’ windows: their life, bustle⁹, and gaiety contrasted strangely with the quiet of those old men creeping along in their black gowns under the ancient arches yonder, whose struggle of life was over, whose hope and noise and bustle had sunk into that grey calm. There was Thomas Newcome arrived at the middle of life, standing¹⁰ between the shouting boys and the tottering¹¹ seniors, and in a situation to moralise upon both, had not his son Clive, who has

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