long ago as 1476. From here a seventeenth-century trade token was issued, reading as follows:

Obverse.-AT YE NEXT BOAT BY · PAVLS=

A boat containing three men; over it, NEXT BOAT. Reverse.-WHARFE AT PETERS HILL FOOT = M. M. B.

Paul's Pier was within a few minutes' walk of Dean's Court, St. Paul's Churchyard, where stands the Deanery, the wall enclosing which is shown, in one of our illustrations, on the left. In 1894 great changes took place at this spot, which had before been singularly quiet and old-fashioned. The entrance from St. Paul's Churchyard was until then through an archway, under a house dating from immediately after the Great Fire, which was said traditionally to have been used by Wren as an office after the rebuilding of St. Paul's. This house is shown in course of demolition, while the ground on the right lies vacant, and we were thus enabled to have a glimpse of the Cathedral, now again quite concealed. The houses to the east, facing St. Paul's Churchyard, together with the Vicar-General's office, and other houses on the same side of Dean's Court, were cleared away to enable Messrs. Pawson and Co. to extend their

warehouses, the Ecclesiastical Commissioners having granted them a building lease for that purpose.

Dean's Court did not actually form part of the precinct of Doctors' Commons (finally cleared away in 1867), but was associated with, and in its immediate neighbourhood. Sam Weller in Pickwick thus humorously refers to the entrance :— "St. Paul's Churchyard low archway on the carriage side, bookseller's at one corner, hotel on the other, and two porters in the middle as touts for licences." It was here that his father was inveigled into matrimony. The Dean's house, yet standing, was built by Wren, after the Great Fire, on the site of the former Deanery, but shorn of the chief part of its garden stretching down to the river, which was portioned off in building leases to defray the cost of the new structure. The porch is decorated with carved festoons of flowers in the style of Grinling Gibbons. There is also a handsome staircase. Little more than a generation ago rooks used to build on the plane trees in front.

Immediately opposite to the south end of Dean's Court, in Carter Lane, an old inn called the Swan with two Necks, with a painted sign against the wall in front, was standing until the