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280 was still alive, but he certainly did not expect to find that Tempest Court was no longer in existence. Such, however, was the case. The march of improvement had swept away hundreds of tumble-down houses, in one of which granny had dwelt for so many years. But she did not live to see that day. In the little home in which she had lived so long she was permitted to die; and so, when the "destroyer," as she would have called it, came to Tempest Court, she was gone—gone home to the Father's mansion, to the "house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."

But Benny knew nothing of this, and so he gazed with a look of pain at the heaps of broken bricks and mortar which men were busy carting away, and thought what a grief it would be to granny. His next visit was to St. George's Hall, and for a while he sat in the shadow of the great portico to watch the hurrying crowds passing up and down. How different it was from the silent country and the still, drowsy fields! What a tremendous hurry everybody seemed to be in! Was it always so? He had never noticed it in the old days: surely the great town must have grown bigger and busier in the years he had been away from it. "But I daresay I shall soon get used to it," he said to himself, as he rose from his seat, and started this time for the landing-stage. Here he saw no change The mighty river was the same as in the old days, a scene of life and beauty. But the children selling matches and the women crying newspapers brought more