Perhaps you are afraid that the preparation, the reading, for such a walk about the City would be dull. I have never found it so. I do not think that anyone who has the least love for, or knowledge of, old things would find such reading dull. There are, to be sure, some unhappy creatures who love nothing but what is new, and esteem everything for what it will fetch. These are the people who are always trying to pull down the City churches. They are at this very moment pulling down another, the poor old church of St. Mary Magdalen. The tower is down, the roof is off the windows are all broken, in a week or two the church will be razed to the ground, and in a year or two its very memory will have perished. Why, we vainly ask, do they pull it down? What harm has the old church done? To be sure its congregation numbered less than a dozen, but then we must not estimate an old church by a modern congregation. There has been a church here from time immemorial. It is mentioned in the year 1120. It was, therefore, certainly a Saxon church. Edward the Confessor probably worshipped here--perhaps King Alfred himself. One of its Rectors was John Carpenter, executor of Whittington, and founder of the City of London School; another was Barham, author of the 'Ingoldsby Legends.' The loss of St. Mary Magdalen is one more link with the past absolutely destroyed, never to be replaced. These destroyers, for instance, are the kind of people who pulled down Sion College. As often as I pass the spot where that place once stood I mourn and lament its loss more and more. It was the college of the City clergy, they were its guardians, it was their library, it contained their reading hall; formerly it held their garden, and it had their almshouses. There was hardly any place in the City more peaceful or more beautiful than the long narrow room which held their library. It was a very ancient site--formerly the site of Elsing's Hospital, the oldest hospital in the whole City. Everything about it was venerable, and yet the City clergy themselves--its official guardians--sold it for what it would fetch, and stuck up the horrid thing on the embankment which they call Sion College. There they still use the old seal and arms of the college. But there is no more a Sion College--that is gone. You cannot replace it. You might as well tear down King's College Chapel at Cambridge and call Dr. Parker's City Temple by that honoured and ancient name. Well, for such people as the majority of the City clergy who can do such things, there can be no voice or utterance at all from ancient stones, the past can have no lessons, no teachings for them, there can be no message to them from the dead who should still live for them in memory and association. For them the ancient City and its citizens are dumb.