Pip, holding his lamp over the stairs one stormy night, saw the returned
convict climbing up to his rooms to disclose the mystery of his Great
Expectations. Close by the gateway from The Temple into Fleet Street, and
adjoining the site of Temple Bar, is Child's ancient banking house, the
original of Tellson's Bank in a "Tale of Two Cities." The demolition of
Temple Bar made necessary some alterations in the bank, too; and when I
was last there the front of the old building which so long defied time and
change was boarded up.

Chancery Lane, opposite The Temple, running from Fleet Street to
Holborn--a distance only a little greater than that between the Fifth and
Sixth Avenues in New York--is the principal pathway through the "perplexed
and troublous valley of the shadow of the law." At either end of it there
are fresh green spots; but the lane itself is wholly given up to legal
dust and darkness. Facing it, on the farther side of Holborn, in a
position corresponding with that of The Temple at the Fleet Street
extremity, is Gray's Inn, especially attractive to me on account of the
long grassy enclosure within its innermost court, so smooth and bright and
well-kept that I always stopt to gaze longingly at it through the railed
barrier which shuts strangers out--as if here were a tennis lawn reserved
for the exclusive vise of frisky barristers.

At No. 2 Holborn Court, in Gray's Inn, David Copperfield, on his return
from abroad near the end of the story, found the rooms of that rising
young lawyer, Mr. Thomas Traddles. There was a great scuttling and
scampering when David knocked at the door; for Traddles was at that moment
playing puss-in-the-corner with Sophy and "the girls." Thavies' Inn, on
the other side of Holborn, a little farther east, is no longer enclosed;
it is only a little fragment of shabby street which starts, with mouth
wide open, to run out of Holborn Circus, and stops short, after a few