times, that there had appeared an American claimant, who had made out his right to the great estate of Smithell's Hall, and had dwelt there, and left posterity, and that in the subsequent generation an ancient baronial title had been revived in favour of the son and heir of the American. Whether this was our Septimius, I cannot tell; but I should be rather sorry to believe that, after such splendid schemes as he had entertained, he should have been content to settle down into the fat substance and reality of English life, and die in his due time, and be buried like any other man.

A few years ago, while in England, I visited Smithell's Hall, and was entertained there, not knowing at the time that I could claim its owner as my countryman by descent; though, as I now remember, I was struck by the thin, sallow, American cast of his face, and the lithe slenderness of his figure, and seem now (but this may be my fancy) to recollect a certain Indian glitter of the eye, and cast of feature.

As for the Bloody Footstep I saw it with my own eyes, and will venture to suggest that it was a mere natural reddish stain in the stone, converted by superstition into a Bloody Footstep.

THE END.

A WET EASTER AT GREENWICH.

I AM old enough to remember Greenwich Fair, and the hideous racket it caused during Easter Week in the pleasant old borougha place to which both nobs and snobs resort for pleasure, which is sometimes "fast;" and yet the town generally looks half cosily, half pathetically, drowsy, as if it were dreaming of its history. And after the Fair, whose "fun" had become a mere synonyme for blackguardism of all kinds, had been, fortunately, put down, I remember Easters during which the Cockneys still flocked down to Greenwich, as the phrase goes, " in their thousands." But those thronged Easters at Greenwich were sunny Easters, and our last Easter was an emphatically "juicy" one. On a day in Easter week, in which damp blinks of sunlight not hung out long enough to dry-alternated with rattling showers, I found myself at Cannon Street Terminus, and took it into my head to run down to see whether Greenwich was looking "jolly under creditable circumstances."

Any one who had left England twenty years ago, and who were now to start for Greenwich from London, for the first time since his return to the old country, would find much to offend his conservative memories of the past, even though he might be compelled to admit that the changes were, logically, improvements. Those who see the improvements made gradually, half grudge each freshest step of progress; but when, after a long exile, a man comes home and finds his landmarks taken away and added to by the dozen, he cannot help at first sorely resenting this wholesale consignment of his life to the dreadful past. In the instance I am referring to, there would be the starting from Charing Cross or Cannon Street Terminus-huge structures, which must seem more like daymare dreams than tangible brick and mortar to the returned wanderer. Then, if he had started from Charing Cross, there would be the three times crossing the river, to get in a queer up-and-down sort of fashion to London Bridge-relegated to the comparative insignificance of a roadside station; to which, if he had resorted in the first instance, he would have found his Greenwich booking-office improved off the surface of the earth, and his North Kent booking-offices turned into refreshment rooms, squeezed in, and darkened by a heavy viaduct. If the river railway-bridges he had travelled over had not been enough to bewilder him, he would have seen also the London, Chatham, and Dover Railway Bridge ruling out the beauty of New Blackfriars Bridge. Westminster Bridge and the Embankment would likewise have been new to him. So would St. Thomas's Hospital, and the

great Southwark Warchouses, he had passed on his puzzled route, to his puzzled rumbling past the dismantled site of old St. Thomas's. The changed look of the London Bridge Station incline would have been an enigma to him; and beyond the station there would be more perplexity. He would see the lines of straight, crossing, and curving rails, which he could not count when he was last in England, mazily multiplied-bits of what had been boundary-walls of the whole conflux of South Eastern and South Coast Railways then, left standing in the middle of the dizzying convergement of rails like crumbling lumps of dingy gingerbread. He would see lines branching off from, and running under the main iron thoroughfare, at all kinds of levels, in confusion worse confounded. He would recognise the old sea of black and yellow hovels, the smoke of whose tenants' torment goeth up for ever; but he would find that the fresher-looking fringes of that dense, dingy ocean of squalid brick and mortar had overlapped acres of market-gardens, which he remembered green with the broad flags of the rhubarb, and white and pink with fruit-blossom, and that towering piles of ornate building had supplanted many of the "works," whose architecture was scarcely distinguishable from that of the jammed hovels it barely overlooked. He would recognise some of the old low-roofed rope-walks, the smell of tan, and the multitudinous less-wholesome stenches of Bermondsey; but he would find the Spa Road Station smartened out of knowledge, and the Commercial Docks Station vanished. He would nod gratefully here and there to a pepper-and-salt old church, but he would not feel religiously inclined when he cast his eyes on the modern places of worship which had sprung up like mushrooms in the district with which he was familiar. Deptford Creek, with its barges wallowing in its mire like swine, may seem to be as normally at low-water as of old. Encouraged by this sight of something that seems the same, the returned wanderer may let his eyes run over the greatly thickened mass of mean masonry lying between him and the river, and exclaim triumphantly, though the ship-sheds, that used to look like blackbeaded turtles with the gloss off, have been freshened up of late"Ah, there's Deptford Dockyard, at any rate."

But a matter-of-fact fellow-passenger soon pulls him up with— "There is no Deptford Royal Dockyard now, sir. What you're alookin' at is the new Foreign Cattle Market; and since the yard was to be a-done away with, it's a good thing that Deptford got the foreign cattle-though there a'n't many on 'em as yet."

Even the returned wanderer cannot remember that Deptford was a very inviting place in his time, but he jumbles up Henry the Eighth founding the dockyard, Elizabeth knighting Drake off it, and Peter the Great working in it, and then getting trundled in a wheelbarrow through prim Mr. Evelyn's trim hedges at Say's Court, and so on, and so on; and his vague historical recollections make him feel that it is incumbent upon him to become vaguely sentimental. He

does not exactly "heave a sigh"-that being done now-a-days only in books, and by slumbering bullocks; but he thinks that the old England to which he has come back is a very different place from what it used to be, even in his time, and tries to think that he is very sorry. On the road to Greenwich such a traveller, however, will find two landmarks that will comfort him. Deptford Station's dinginess is stereotyped-it is neither worse nor better than when he left it twenty years ago. The portly official with the wooden leg, for many a year familiar to Deptford Station habitués, is the only missing feature. The dusty, draughty dreariness of Greenwich Station has also been stereotyped, and in it our returned traveller can see at the present day the precise facsimile, at any rate, of the traffic-manager, in a chimney-pot hat over a uniform coat, he must remember of old. The rolling-stock is new. The cattle-truck, open third-class carriages have been abolished; the second-class carriages are comfortably cushion-backed and seated; the first-class carriages, although not improved inside, are smarter outside; but the station remains the same to a cursory glance as when our wanderer last left it.

"Very differently peopled, though," he would say if that last time had been in Greenwich Fair time, however wet the Easter might have been. My train dropped far more passengers at Spa Road than it landed at Greenwich. Two or three dribbled out at Deptford, and then I could not help thinking of ships drifting with the dead to shores where all was dumb. My only carriage companion was a silent, feeble old widow, who, I fancy, in the old times, would as soon have thought of flying as of travelling on the Greenwich Railway at Easter-even of stepping outside her Greenwich front-door, or even of peeping, when roysterers were passing, through her blinded front parlour window. The poor old lady had nothing to alarm her as the train rolled into the dull station, along whose platform 'the porters crawled snail-like, but apparently without any of the snail's love of rain. They could take things more easily than they could have done if the holiday had been fine; but, after all, they had the same amount of work to get through, without any supporting excitement. The fly-drivers outside the station were almost too sulkily hopeless of fares to make even a pretence of lifting their whips, and the shoeblacks mumbled "Shine your boots, sir," in a drowsy, afternoonservice tone. It was the routine they had to get through, but they evidently had faint expectation of finding any one fool enough to want to have "shined" boots which would become as dim and muddy as ever after half a dozen yards' walk.

In London Street a few beery roughs, with vari-coloured paper ornaments in their hats and caps, were taking their pleasure after the manner of their kind, shoutingly and pushingly, but they had scarcely any one but those of their own kind to shove up against. Shopkeepers stood at the doors of their shops, gaping with ennui. The police interfered in some trivial row, and took the offenders

along a narrow side lane; a little crowd crammed its mouth, andthe street was empty. The present fine parish church of Greenwich, although it has a venerable, Time-touched look, is comparatively modern, being one of " Queen Anne's new fifty;" but it carries itself as if it knew that the Danes killed its patron-saint, St. Alphage, on its site, and that Henry the Eighth was baptised and married to Catherine of Arragon in its predecessor. St. Alphage's, when I passed it in the rain, looked calmly pleased that no vulgar row disturbed its Easter contemplations. Quaint old Church Street, which, if I remember rightly, Clarkson Stanfield has limned in his illustrations of Poor Jack a thoroughly Greenwichy story-was perfectly quiet. A little damp bunting was, not flying, but dismally drooping in the tea-and-shrimps street, which has an advertisement of the Crown and Sceptre at its corner. The street running down to the Ship and the Pier might have been a rifle-range. A man, with his damply glossy hat-brim drooping like a water-spaniel's ears just out of the water, was-too late, I thought-sheltering from the rain in the Nelson Street entrance of the melancholy, deserted markets. Along Nelson Street, however, from East Greenwich, with splashboards covered with mud, came a vehicle that would have astounded the hypothetical returned wanderer to whom I have made reference: to wit, a tram-car. It looked like a tram-hearse, with its one grim passenger. The rain having moderated into mizzle, and having Nelson Street almost to myself, I stopped by a lamp-post and tried to "realise the historical interest" of the place in which, under my umbrella still, I had planted myself. On one hand was the house which Inigo Jones built for Henrietta Maria; on the other, the magnificent pile which Henrietta's son began to build for his own enjoyment, but which, through the compassion of his niece, became the noble hospital in which thousands of old sailors have found shelter, and yarned about adventures in all parts of the world. a-days the old boys prefer fourteen shillings a week and their service pension outside the walls, to the Hospital's 7 lbs. of bread, 5 lbs. of meat, pint of peas, pound and a quarter of cheese, 2 ounces of butter, 14 quarts of beer, and shilling, eighteenpence, or half-a-crown tobacco money a week. I fancy that in one sense they cannot live nearly so "well" now as they lived in the Hospital, but perhaps they live better in another; and it is a good thing they had the chance of leaving offered them, for the jolly old boys, little as their liberty was restricted, were always grumbling whilst they stayed at "the College." Still it made a wet Easter at Greenwich drearier than ever to see no blue "geese" rolling about the streets, and the grand old Hospital, although part of it has been turned into an hospital in the medical and surgical sense, almost as solitary as Balclutha. What a long way back the history of its site extends. Nearly six hundred years ago it bore a royal residence. There Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, embattled and then rebuilt his manor-house, enclosing at the same

Now