that the King of France had been put to death. Her range of conscious knowledge extended from the execution of Louis XVI. to the Jubilee of Queen Victoria. So short a thing is history.
Sir Walter Stirling, who was born in 1802 and died in 1888, was a little old gentleman of ubiquitous activity, running about London with a yellow wig, short trousers, and a cotton umbrella. I well remember his saying to me, when Mr. Bradlaugh was committed to the Clock Tower, "I don't like this. I am afraid it will mean mischief. I am old enough to remember seeing Sir Francis Burdett taken to the Tower by the Sergeant-at-Arms with a military force. I saw the riot then, and I am afraid I shall see a riot again."
In the same year (1888) died Mrs. Thomson Hankey, wife of a former M.P. for Peterborough. Her father, a Mr. Alexander, was born in 1729, and she had inherited from him traditions of London as it appeared to a young Scotsman in the year of the decapitation of the rebels after the rising of 1745.
One o
