"I should jolly well think so." So the Editor gave Noël a sovereign and a shilling, and he shook hands with us both. But he thumped Noël on the back and said: Now go Not "Buck up, old man! It's your first guinea, but it won't be your last. along home; and in about ten years you can bring me some more poetry. before. See? I'm just taking this poetry of yours because I like it very much; but we don't put poetry in this paper at all. I shall have to put it in another paper I know of." "What do you put in your paper?" I asked; for father always takes the Daily Chronicle, and I didn't know what the Recorder was like. "Oh, news," said he, "and dull articles, and things about Celebrities,—if you knew any Celebrities now?” Noël asked him what Celebrities were. "Oh, the Queen and the Princes, and people with titles, and people who write. or sing or act, or do something clever or wicked.” "I don't know anybody wicked," said Oswald, wishing he had known Dick Turpin or Claud Duval, so as to be able to tell the Editor things about them; "but I know some one with a title-Lord Tottenham." How did you come to know him?” "The mad old Protectionist, eh? "We don't know him to speak to. But he goes over the heath every day at three; and he strides along like a like a giant, with a black cloak like Lord Tennyson's flying behind him, and he talks to himself like one o'clock.” "What does he say?" The Editor had sat down again, and he was fiddling with a blue pencil. "We only heard him once close enough to understand, and then he said, "The curse of the country, sir-ruin and desolation,' and then he went striding along again, hitting the furze bushes as if they were the heads of his enemies." "Excellent descriptive touch," said the Editor to himself. "Well, go on." “That's all I know about him, except that he stops in the middle of the heath every day, and he looks all round to see if there's any one about, and if there isn't he takes his collar off” The Editor interrupted and said: "You're not romancing? "I beg your pardon?" said Oswald. 'Drawing the long bow, I mean," said the Editor. Oswald drew himself up and said he wasn't a liar. The Editor only laughed, and said romancing and lying were not at all the same, but it was important to know what you were playing at. So Oswald accepted his apology and went on: "We were hiding among the furze bushes one day and we saw him do it. He took off his collar, and he put on a clean one, and he threw the other one among the furze bushes. We picked it up afterwards, and it was a beastly paper one." "Thank you," said the Editor, and he got up and put his hand in his pocket. "That's well worth five shillings, and here they are. Would you like to see round the printing office before you go home?" So I pocketed my five bob, and thanked him. I said we should like it very much. He called another gentleman and said something we couldn't hear. Then he said good-bye again, and all this time Noël hadn't said a word. But now he said: "I've made a poem about you. It is called 'Lines to a Noble Editor.' Shall I write it down?" The Editor gave him the blue pencil, and he sat down at the Editor's table and It was this; he told it me afterwards as well as he could remember : wrote. "May life's choicest blessings be your lot! I think you ought to be very blest, And you may have this as well as the rest." "Thank you," said the Editor. "I don't think I ever had a poem addressed to me before. I shall treasure it, I assure you." Then the other gentleman laughed, and said something about Mæcenas, and we went off to the printing office, with at least one pound seven in our pockets. It was good hunting, and no mistake! But he never put Noël's poetry in the Daily Recorder. It was quite a long time after we saw a sort of story in a magazine on the station bookstall, and the Editor had written it, I suppose. It said a lot about Noël and me, describing us all wrong and saying how we had tea with the Editor, and all Noël's poems were in the story thing. I think the Editor made game of them, but Noël is quite pleased, so that's all right. It wasn't my poetry anyhow, I'm glad to say. E. NESBIT. APRIL. COME, like a hope to a gloomy breast, And news that the summer nears, I thrill the world with a strange delight; And the herb-lorn lea is swift bedight While the rain for an hour or two every day I sing of love, and my strains console BERNARD MALCOLM RAMSAY. SOUTH LONDON. IV. A FORGOTTEN PALACE. LL round London, like beads upon a string, were dotted Royal Houses, Palaces, and Hunting Places. On the north side were Westminster, Whitehall, St. James's, Kensington, Shene, Theobald's, Hatfield, Cheshunt, King's Langley, Hunsdon, Havering-atte-Bower, Stepney, the Tower; on the south side were Kennington, Eltham, Greenwich, a tradition attaching to Streatham, and the House of Nonesuch, built by Henry VIII. at Cheam. Most of these royal houses are now clean forgotten. Eltham preserves some ruins left of Edward IV.'s buildings; it still shows the moat and the old bridge, and the line of its former wall; but tradition, which has quite forgotten its memories of the Edwards and the Tudors, describes it as the Palace of King John. The sailors-now, alas! also gone-have deprived Greenwich of Edward VI. and Elizabeth. Theobald's is gone altogether, Nonesuch is wholly cleared away. Of Kennington, of which I have to speak in this place, not one stone remains upon another; not a vestige is above ground; the people on the spot know of no remains underground; its very memory is gone and forgotten: there is not even a tradition left, although part of the ruins were still standing only a hundred years ago. The reason for this oblivion is not far to seek. The palace was deserted; it was pulled down before 1607-Camden says that even then there was not a stone remaining-there was not a single house within half a mile in every direction. There was no one, when the last stones had been carted away, left to remember or to remind his children that there had been a palace on this spot. Another house was built here, but no tradition attached to it. Two hundred years passed and then came the destruction of the second house; in 1745 there was not even a cottage near the spot. This being so, it is not difficult to understand why the site was forgotten. The moat remained, however, and apparently some of the substructures; a building of stone and thatch, part of the offices of the palace, also stood. They called it the " Long Barn," and when the distressed Protestants were brought over VOL. XIV.-No. 60. 545 35 down. At the beginning of the century houses began to rise here and there; streets began to be formed: at least three streets cross the gardens and the site of the palace; but there is not one tradition of a place which, as we shall see, was full of history for six hundred years. "Is this fame?" might ask the king who crowned himself here, the king who died here, the king who was brought up here, the kings who kept their Christmas feast here, the kings who here received their brides, held Parliament, and went out a-hunting. The king who crowned himself here was Harold Harefoot, son of Cnut-that is to say, it was at "Lambeth," and there was no other house at Lambeth. The king who died in this house was that young Dane who appears to have been an incarnation of the ideal Danish brutality. He dragged his brother's body out of its grave and flung it into the Thames; he massacred the people of Worcester and ravaged the shire; and he did these brave deeds and many others all in two short years. Then he went to his own place. His departure was both fitting and dramatic. For one so young it showed with what a yearning and madness he had been drinking. He went across the river-there was, I repeat, no other house in Lambeth except this, so that it must have been here-to attend the wedding of his standard-bearer, Tostig the Proud, with Goda, daughter of the Thane Osgod Clapa, whose name survives in his former estate of Clapham. A Danish wedding was always an occasion for hard drinking, while the minstrels played and sang and the mummers tumbled. When men were well drunken the pleasing sport of bone throwing began: they threw the bones at each other. The fun of the game consisted in the accident of a man not being able to dodge the bone which struck him, and probably killed him. Archbishop Alphege was thus killed. The soldiers had no special desire to kill the old man: why couldn't he enter into the spirit of the game and dodge the bones? As he did not, of course he was hit, and as the bone was a big and a heavy bone, hurled by a powerful hand, of course it split open his skull. One may be permitted to think that perhaps King Hardacnut, who is said to have fallen down suddenly when he "stood up to drink," did actually intercept a big beef bone which knocked him down; and as he remained comatose until he died, the proud Tostig, unwilling to have it said that even in sport his king had been killed at his wedding, gave out that the king fell down in a fit. This, however, is speculation. Forty years after this event, when Domesday Book was compiled, the place was in the possession of a London citizen, Theodric by name and a goldsmith by trade. It was still a royal manor, because the goldsmith held it of Edward the Confessor. It was then valued at three pounds a year. It is impossible to cost of provisions, and with from Wester Bridge the wages and pay of servants The Prince's Walk New Road The way from the Block Princes Stairs to the Toblace 10 acres of Garden There is the price of bread; but then there were so many kinds of bread-wheaten bread, barley bread, oat bread, rye bread; and how much bread did a family of the working class consume? Flesh, fish, fowl: but how much of either did the working classes enjoy? Rent? But in the farms the "villains" paid no rent. There is, in a word, not only the market prices that have to be considered, but the standard of comfort-always a little higher than the practice-and the daily relations of the demand to the supply. So that when we read that this manor of Kennington was worth three pounds a year we are not advanced in the least. As most of the land was still marshy and useless, we may understand that the value was low. Henry III. We next hear of Kennington in 1189, when King Richard granted it on lease, or for life, to Sir Robert Percy with the title of Lord of the Manor. came here on several occasions; here he held his Lambeth Parliament. his Christmas here in 1231. Great was the feasting and boundless the hospitality of the Christmas when this king lavished the treasures of the State. The site of the palace is indicated in the accompanying map. If you walk along the Kennington Road from Bridge Street, Westminster, you presently come to a place where four roads meet, Upper Kennington Lane on the left, and Lower Kennington Lane on the right; the road goes on to the Horns Tavern and Kennington Park. On the right-hand side stood the palace. In the year 1636 a plan of the house and grounds was executed; but by that time the medieval character of the place was quite forgotten. It was was a square house, probably Elizabethan; the home of King Henry III. at some time or other had been completely taken away. The site of the moat, however, was left, and there was still standing the "Long Barn." The only way to find out what the palace really was in the thirteenth or fourteenth century is to compare it with another palace built under much the same conditions, and intended to serve the same purpose. Fortunately there still stand, some miles to the east of Kennington, at Eltham, important remains of such a contemporary palace, with a description of the place as it was before it was allowed to fall into ruins. We are not concerned with the history of Eltham. It is sufficient to note that it was a great and stately place for five hundred years and more; that it passed through the hands of Bishop Odo; of the Mandevilles; of the De Vescis; of Bishop Anthony Bec; and of Geoffrey le Scrope of Masham. As a royal residence its history begins with Henry III., who kept his Christmas here in 1270, and ends |