the Sporting Club, - the white building seen in my sketch through the columns of St. Paul's. Of the pedigree of the adjoining structures, no question can arise. The "Bedford Hotel," which runs out of my sketch on its extreme right hand, is to-day the same old pile of masonry that welblack, queer, and fog-stained comed Thackeray in his younger days, as well as many of his characters. Here he invariably "put up," whenever in his early wanderings he strayed into London. His description of it might almost be written under my sketch, so little changes have taken place in the surroundings: one "The two great national theatres on one side," he says, "a churchyard full of mouldy but undying celebrities on the other; a fringe of houses studded in every part with anecdote or history; an arcade often more gloomy and deserted than a cathedral aisle; a rich cluster of brown old taverns of them filled with the counterfeit presentments of many actors long since silent, who scowl and smile once more. from the canvas upon the grandsons of their dead admirers; a something in the air which breathes of old books, old painters, and old authors; a place beyond all other places one would choose in which to hear the chimes at midnight, a crystal palace the representative of the present which presses in timidly from a corner upon many things of the past; a withered bank that has been sucked dry by a felonious clerk, a squat building with a hundred columns, and chapel-looking fronts, which always stands knee-deep in baskets, flowers, and scattered vegetables; a common centre into which Nature showers her choicest gifts, and where the kindly fruits of the earth often nearly choke the narrow thoroughfares; a population that never seems to sleep, and that does all in its power to prevent other sleeping; a place where the very latest suppers and the earliest breakfasts jostle each other over the footways." This same bustle and noise surrounded my easel when I opened it under the great portico of St. Paul's, and began the composition with the church on my left, its columns framing the buildings which Thackeray's pen made so real, and so interesting to his readers of to-day. The crowd about me was greater, perhaps, than usual, because of the novelty of the sight - outdoor painters being scarce at Covent Garden Market-and because, no doubt, the roof of the portico served as a shelter from the rain, which seemed determined to make a day of it. But it was a goodnatured, orderly crowd, the market-men marking a protecting circle about me with the toes of their heavy boots, the women and children looking over their shoulders. None of them had ever heard of "Evans's." They all knew that the white house between the columns, and which my bit of charcoal was making clear to them, had been a tavern of one kind or another-longer ago than even the oldest could remember-up to the time the Sporting Club moved in, but that was as far as their information went. They "knowed all about" Tavistock's, next the Bedford. I could get "a bite and a pint o' bitters easy, if I was a bit hongry at Tavistock's." And so, the sketch finished and the rain over, I betook myself to the old, mouldy, smoky tavern under the arcade, and sat me down to the very table no doubt, at which |