Page:Hopkinson Smith--In Dickens's London.djvu/51

IN LANT STREET Whether the old fireplace around which the two cronies sat trembling is still intact behind the measly front I do not know, for I did not go in to see; but yet it must be! For if any ambition to renew or repair had ever inspired the dwellers within it must have long since died out in so dreary a byway as Lant Street; nor will it ever be again revived. Houses, like old people, dry up and crumble, and end at last with only a graveyard fence and a tablet giving their names and future prospects.

And now for another of Mr. Sawyer's haunts, for there is no doubt in my mind when considering that gentleman's partiality for the flowing bowl that the subject of my sketch—the "Ship and Shovel"—must have been one of our distinguished sawbone's resorts. Perhaps the ingredients of the punch when "ready-made in a red pan" came from behind its bar, or it might be that the glasses which had been "borrowed for the occasion from the public house" were gathered up within its precincts, as well as the tray itself—a foregone conclusion when one realises that the wall of the enclosure in which Guy's Hospital stands is opposite the inn itself, and thus but a step from the classroom to its bar, the dividing highway being known as Maze Pond Terrace—a short shadow-flecked street arched by feathery trees, its perspective melting into a mist of leaves.

I hope that its stretches of trees, shrubbery, and vines, their roots fast in the garden adjoining the "Ship and Shovel" and in the spaces surrounding Guy's Hospital, were as lovely in the days of that delightful young reprobate as they are now, but I cannot say. The tree trunks are not so 25