A VISITOR from the United States of America woke up in his hotel in Northumberland Avenue, on his first morning in the old country, and hardly waited to do justice to his breakfast before sallying forth to inspect all the historical marvels of London, which exercise such a potent fascination over the minds of those who live in a new country. He was in a position to inspect these marvels with greater ease than any man before his date, for he had brought over with him the first working time-machine ever constructed, and by its aid he intended to see for himself how cities are made, and to be present at every detail of the growth. He attracted but little attention in the street; his secret had been well kept, or the mob would have made a fair trial impossible; and the machine was eyed by the passers with only a slight glance of wonder as if it had been some new-fangled sort of motor tricycle. Quivering with anticipation the visitor made his way to the north side of .

He saw before him the sight so familiar to us all, the

As he sat there surveying it, the hand of the visitor touched the spring of the machine almost unconsciously, and slowly he went back through the ages. In the earlier part of the sixteenth century the house had disappeared, and there in place of it was a small religious house, St. Mary Rounceval. It had escaped so far the reforming tendencies of Henry VIII., but was to be suppressed in the reign of his son. Behind it was a large plot of ground enclosed with brick, where the Kings of Scotland were wont to lodge in ancient days when they came to the Parliament of England; this was later known as Scotland Yard. The visitor, glancing at his time register saw that he was now in the year , a date that enabled him to appreciate what happened a little later.

To his right, on the spot where now stands the statue of Charles I., arose a stately cross of white Caen stone, pure as the day it was erected in , and the model of which we may see in station yard to this day. The condition of the pure cross drew the stranger's attention to the difference of the atmospheric conditions from those of the time when he had started; behind and all around him stretched fields, and the air was as clear as that of the country on a May morning. To the northward there was no church, but fields only, in the which Henry VIII. was to found, six years later, the first Church of St. Martin's in the Fields. At the beginning of the long, muddy country road called

The cavalcade turned into a gateway of the palace on the east side of Whitehall below Scotland Yard. The palace was a congeries of red-brick buildings, not unlike St. James's, but more rambling and confused; glimpses of courts filled with eager, restless servitors

A sudden desire to see the end of this palace, to see it melt and fall, seized upon the visitor, he pressed his finger on the spring marked "forward" and came slowly upwards toward our own time, but after a short time he stopped and remained spell-bound. The palace was still there though much altered and enlarged. Recent attempts had evidently been made at renovation, for there now stood facing the roadway a majestic building of Portland stone in a very different style from the old ruinous red-brick walls around it. It had a row of windows across the frontage, and altogether it seemed strangely familiar. Where had he seen it that very morning ? Why, in the guide-book of course, as a representation of the Banqueting Hall, still standing, the only fragment that was ever executed of Inigo Jones's great design for a new palace of Whitehall. But as he gazed on it he noted how it was half hidden by a great platform that rose to the lower sills of the upper-storey windows; and on the platform there was a man, slight and small and timid-looking, and in the group round him were soldiers in uniform, a bishop in full robes, and men in state dress, yet none was so conspicuous or so dignified as that slight, small figure partially disrobed. The waiting multitudes beneath, hemmed in by horsemen, so that they could not reach the scaffold, looked on with upturned faces in which awe, anxiety, and deep dread were mingled. Presto ! The scene had changed, the machine had slipped on, but

Passing through this he found himself in , that narrow street through which all the pageantry of royalty had to pass for many generations. Funerals and marriages, christenings and state ceremonials had been crowded in between those overhanging houses, three and four storeys high, with carved work and escutcheons and blazoned arms on their frontage. No

The visitor knew that here had stood the great palace occupied by our kings up to the time of the transference to Whitehall, and he gazed in wonder, speculating which of the buildings he now saw were the remnants of this palace. The Chapel of St. Stephen was apparent enough, rising high on the south; here sat

Turning away westward somewhat sadly, the visitor found his attention attracted by a massive and sombre square keep of blackened stone, standing on the site of the present Guildhall; he approached it wondering at its windowless condition, and surmising on the darkness within, when he realised that this must be the famous Sanctuary, the refuge of hunted criminals, and his attention redoubled. The little narrow, irregular, pointed windows strongly barred, the old bastion projecting from the straight undecorated wall, and the low doorway riveted his attention. Here noble and subject, prince and pauper, the innocent and the guilty had fled in days when retribution was swift and inquiries none too certain. It had served its purpose, this grim citadel, sheltering all alike until means could be found of proving innocence or providing for escape. Twice did Queen , wife of ., fly here; and while within this rough, dark dwelling the first time gave birth to her elder boy, to be a king in name but never in fact. Looking away from this place of dark memories the visitor saw almost immediately another tower, like and yet unlike the Sanctuary; like in its lack of ornament and its plain severity of outline, but differing in that it was a double gateway and not a solid building. The

The man of the time-machine had seen nearly enough; his brain could no longer contain all the mystery and the wonder of this ever-changing City. Merely for the sake of contrast he pressed the button " forward," and found himself once more brought up sharply in the present century on the day on which he had started. Before him stretched Victoria Street, grim and grey, with the asphalt shining between the precipitous houses like a river of ice in a deep cañon. Offices on every floor and part of a floor were to be found in those tall buildings. A motor car whizzed past, slackening speed behind a string of omnibuses, a telegraph lad on a red bicycle caught on to the back for a moment to balance himself. The cabmen exchanged jokes at the cabstand in the middle of the street. Farther on a vast modern emporium attracted crowds of buyers, who followed

Turning down a side street, the stranger came suddenly upon a huge cathedral in red brick, the very latest of the ecclesiastical buildings in the Metropolis, and then he let his machine go backward once more. Vanished in a flying haze were the houses, the buildings, and the streets; except for a line of picturesque almshouses a little to the east, there was nothing but a wide open space of green, with two large marshy ponds enclosed in its low-lying ground.

The machine ran backwards, slowly and more slowly, and stopped suddenly at the date . The fields were alive with people. Booths, and tents, and pavilions, decorated with streamers and flags, occupied all the available space. Men-at-arms hastened from one tent to another. Pages, bearing dishes, got inextricably mixed up with them in their hurry. The horses, a goodly number in brilliant trappings, champed and stamped a space apart ; all was bustle, confusion, and haste. Then in a moment the bustle ceased, every man stood erect and steady in his place. Two glistening lines of men-at-arms formed a lane down which rode a gay cavalcade of men and women on horseback, rainbow-hued, with garments and trappings of cloth of gold, of crimson, and azure, and as they passed not a head but was bared before them, while a mighty shout drowned even the fanfaronade of trumpets, and all at once there rushed upon the visitor's mind the words of that ancient chronicler Stow, whose writings he knew by heart.

the King's Councillor and Priest, did invite to a stately dinner the kings and queens of Scotland and England, the king's son, and earls, barons, and knights, the Bishop of London and several citizens, whereby his guests did grow to such a number that his house at Totehill could not receive them, but that he was forced to set up tents and pavilions to receive his guests, whereof there was such a multitude that seven hundred messes of meat did not serve for the first dinner.

With renewed interest at the thought of the goodly company he was keeping, the visitor watched the arrival of the royal party at a gorgeous tent set at one end of the field. He noted the ladies as they alighted, and marked the high pointed head-dresses and the flowing wimples; he saw their gowns, blue and green, red and gold, sweeping the ground in folds; he saw the unrivalled embroidery of their cloaks, and the inlaid armour of the men; when in his eagerness leaning forward he accidentally touched the spring of his machine, and flick! the show had disappeared, but in its place was another of the year .

There was a great space cleared, about the length of a cricket pitch either way, and around it, raised on platforms, as on a grand stand, were a number of people whose high degree was evidenced by the beauty and costliness of their costumes. Behind them, crowding every vantage-point where a view of the cleared space could be obtained, was a vast crowd of men and women, soldiers and lads, jostling each other in their

Somewhat tired of waiting while so much arguing went on and such long speeches were made, which by reason of the distance he could not hear, the visitor set his machine forward once more.

Once again flick ! and behold a fair with booths, and shows, and punchinellos, stalls for merchandise, and a goodly gathering of purchasers and sightseers. The visitor watched with interest the aspects of the fair, and concluded that it was much the same as in our own day, much scampering about and talking, much haggling over prices and advertising of wares, and in all a great running to and fro and but little done. Wearily he turned on his machine once more, when behold! an awful spectacle. Numbers of rough, strongly built carts laden with dead bodies; a solemn and awful procession; a great pit, shallow enough in all conscience, wherein the bodies were laid in rows and rows, dressed as they were. Even afar off, and in spite of the rags and soil stains of their clothes, it could be seen that they were in some sort of uniform, and this the visitor understood. He hardly needed to glance at his dial to see the date 652, for well he knew that these hundreds of dead men were the prisoners who had been taken at the battle of Worcester, and were Scotsmen, who had been brought to London and had died in sorrow and sickness far from their native land. So badly buried were they that loads of extra soil had afterwards to be laid upon the shallow graves.

With a quick movement of the hand the visitor was back in the present day. He had seen enough; and, a wiser man than when he started, he made his way back to Northumberland Avenue, with a gallery of mental pictures in his brain.