He was in a very subdued frame of mind when he left the cemetery and wended his way in the direction of Tempest Court. He could not help wondering as he threaded his way through the busy streets whether granny was still alive, but he certainly did not expect to find that Tempest Court was no longer in existence. Such, however, was the case. The march of improvement had swept away hundreds of tumble-down houses, in one of which granny had dwelt for so many years. But she did not live to see that day. In the little home in which she had lived so long she was permitted to die; and so, when the "destroyer," as she would have called it, came to Tempest Court, she was gone—gone home to the Father's mansion, to the "house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens."

But Benny knew nothing of this, and so he gazed with a look of pain at the heaps of broken bricks and mortar which men were busy carting away, and thought what a grief it would be to granny. His next visit was to St. George's Hall, and for a while he sat in the shadow of the great portico to watch the hurrying crowds passing up and down. How different it was from the silent country and the still, drowsy fields! What a tremendous hurry everybody seemed to be in! Was it always so? He had never noticed it in the old days: surely the great town must have grown bigger and busier in the years he had been away from it. "But I daresay I shall soon get used to it," he said to himself, as he rose from his seat, and started this time for the landing-stage. Here he saw no change. The mighty river was the same as in the old days, a scene of life and beauty. But the children selling matches and the women crying newspapers brought more vividly back to his mind than anything else the days of his own childhood. In the cemetery it seemed a life-time since he went away; here, on the stage, it seemed only yesterday since he was a poor famished child, earning a precarious living as best he could. He could hardly realize that he was a strong, well-dressed young man. Once or twice the word "Perks" leaped to his lips as a shock-headed ragged lad ran against him; and when a little girl came up to him with "Fusees, sir?" the face of his dead little sister seemed to flash upon him for a moment, and he started and turned pale, then handed the child some coppers, and patted her on the head, telling her to be a good girl.