Silence everywhere.  The blinds are down in every window of the tall stack of offices, the doors are all closed, if there are shutters they are up, there are no carte in the streets, no porters carry burdens, there are no wheelbarrows, there is no more work done of any kind or sort.  Even the taverns and the eating-shops are shut—­no one is thinking of work.  To-morrow—­Monday—­poverty will lift again his cruel arm, and drive the world to work with crack of whip.  The needle-woman will appear again with her bundle of work; the porters, the packers, the carmen, the clerks, the merchants themselves will all come back—­the vast army of those who earn their daily bread in the City will troop back again.  But as for to-day, nobody works; we are all at rest; we are at peace; we are taking holiday.

This is the day—­this is the time—­for those who would study the City and its monuments.  It is only on this day, and at this time, that the churches are all open.  It is only on this day, and at this time, that a man may wander at his ease and find out how the history of the past is illustrated by the names of the streets, by the houses and the sites, and by the few old things which still remain, even by the old things, names and all, which have perished.  The area of the City is small; its widest part, from Blackfriars to the Tower, is but a single mile in length, and its greatest depth is no more that half a mile But it is so crowded and crammed full of sites sacred to this or that memory of its long life of two thousand busy years, there is so much to think of in every street, that a pilgrim may spend all his Sunday mornings for years and never get to the end of London City.  I should hardly like to say how many Sunday mornings I have myself spent in wandering about the City, Yet I can never go into it without making some new discovery.  Only last week, for instance, I discovered in the very midst of the City, in its most crowded part, nothing less than a house—­with a private garden.  I had thought that the last was destroyed about four years ago when they pulled down a certain noble old merchant’s mansion, No, there is one other stall left; perhaps more.  There are gardens, I know, belonging to certain Companies’ Halls; there is the ivy-planted garden of Amen Court; there are burying-grounds laid out as gardens; but this is the only house I know in the City which has a private garden at the back.  One must not say where it is, otherwise that garden will be seized and built upon.  This the owner evidently fears, for he has surrounded it by a high wall, so that no one shall be able to seize it, no rich man shall covet it, and offer to buy it and build great warehouses upon it, and the underground railway shall not dig it out and swallow it up.