and so on, and so on.  Of course there are
writings produced, and marked with all the
letters in the alphabet, from A to Z inclusive,
attached to this swearing, which would have
perplexed the Sphinx, and which are calculated
to cause octogenarian witnesses to
cast their spectacles into the dust, in despair.
Of course there is the difficulty of persuading
anybody of eighty that mere signing
his or her name to an affidavit and kissing
the New Testament at two and sixpence
a time, is such a harmless and common proceeding
as the Court of Chancery insists
that it is.

But this is not all.  I find that, before
I can get the Court of Chancery to give me
the proper reading of this disputed passage
— about two lines— every person who is
named, or can be constructively supposed to
be interested, in the will, must be not only
before the Court, but that each of these
persons must prove everybody else's case
and his or her own too.  The family of A,
for instance, come before the Court, and
bring all those parties with them, who could
by any possibility have any claim to the
money.  The family of B come before the
Court and bring with them all those parties
who could by any possibility have any claim
to the money.  The family of C (which unfortunately
is my family) then come before
the Court, and bring with them all those
parties (of course including all the parties
who have been already brought by A and B)
before the Court, who could by any possibility
have any claim to the money; and,
nothing effectual can be done until all of
us, like the clowns in all the pantomimes
that were ever acted (including the clowns
who have tumbled into Chancery), can say
of their own motion, " Here we are!"

We are not very great enemies to each
other, many of us have never heard of one
another before, although we know all about
each other's pedigrees as well as most families
do; yet the High Court of Chancery
insists in the most emphatic way, that we
shall keep on pelting each other with affidavits
about them.  The frequency with which
I, for instance, have sworn, and the half-crowns
I have paid, since I came before the
Court, are something awful to think of.
And after all, we are no nearer the grand
consummation:— that of getting a plain construction
put upon the villanous parenthesis
by some one in authority.

Whether we are not all before the Court,
or whether there are too many of us
before the Court (which I think the more
likely), I do not know; but we do not
get on.

I merely wish to inform the world that
I am before the Court; that, if ever I
should get behind it or out of it, I shall lay
the fact to heart and rejoice.  I should
then be glad to bring myself forward as an
instance of anybody having ever got out of
Chancery within a reasonable time; and, if I
do, the public shall hear of it, the editor of this
journal being willing.

A LONDON PARISH.

IN a recent number we described a Home
for the Homeless in Playhouse Yard, near
Cripplegate.  As a pendant to that description
we now present our readers with a brief
notice of the parish in which it stands: —
St. Thomas Charterhouse.  We are indebted
for it to the Reverend William Rogers, its
incumbent.

The district is contained in an area of seventeen
acres, or eighty-two thousand two hundred and eighty
square yards, and the length of the boundary line is
one mile, less one hundred and fifty-four yards.  Every
better description of house has been scrupulously cut
out by the original apportioners of the district, who
have zigzagged the boundary line in a most extraordinary
and unnecessary manner, in order to accomplish
their object, and who have finally concluded by leaving
it a net-work of the very lowest description of courts
and alleys, forty-four of which are blind, the open ones
leading one out of another, and eventually debouching
in Whitecross Street and Goswell Street.  Some idea
of the poverty of the district may be formed from the
following facts:— There are nine thousand five hundred
persons contained in one thousand one hundred and
seventy-eight houses, the total rental of the district
being fourteen thousand six hundred and sixty pounds,
or about twelve pounds per house.

Many of these houses are mere kennels, such as my
friends in the country would not for a moment allow
their dogs to inhabit, and which her Majesty's pigs,
which I had the honour to visit at Windsor, would
not even deign to look upon.  In any other district,
these would long ago have been condemned by the
surveyor; but here, like every other abomination, they
are suffered to exist.  Now and then, at cholera time,
perhaps, a stir is made, and one or two are pulled
down and offered up as a sacrifice to appease the tardily
excited wrath of the Paving Board, whose bowels of
compassion have been hardened by a letter from the
Home Office, — and then all is over.  This is a most
extraordinary movement; generally a little external
whitewashing is deemed quite sufficient, and the
authorities are satisfied.

Some of the houses, however, are not without pretensions,
and bear evident traces of having been occupied
by a very superior class of inhabitants.  Indeed,
even Golden Lane has its classic reminiscences.  One
of the houses is called the Palace — (remarkable to say,
it is not a gin palace) — and bears the royal arms emblazoned
upon its front.  The legend of the lane is,
that this was Queen Elizabeth's nursery, and though I
have not been able to trace the legend to its source,
still the names of some of the localities carry us back
to the days of the good Queen Bess.  There is Bear
and Ragged Staff Yard, doubtless so called from the
arms of the Earl of Leicester; and Playhouse Yard,
where Alleyne's theatre, the Fortune, stood.  This is
now the property of Dulwich College; and is described
in the letters patent from James the First to Edward
Alleyne as " all those messuages, lande, tenemente,
gardens, hereditamente, and buildinge of our said servante,
Edward Alleyne, called or known by the name
of the Fortune, situate and being in Whitecross Street,
Golden Lane, in that parte of the parishe of Sainte
Gyles without Creppelgate, London, which is within
the county of Middlesex."  Whether this district was