TRAITORS' GATE
THE TOWER.—The most remarkable thing about the free show-places of London is that they are very little used—at any rate, by Londoners. Take the Tower of London, which has been the background, so to speak, of all the darkest, and at the same time the most interesting, scenes in English history. Queen Elizabeth was immured in the Well Tower; the Earl of Essex in the Devereux Tower; and in the White Tower, Sir Walter Raleigh. In the Bloody Tower the two sons of Edward IV. were murdered; and in Bowyer's Tower, George Duke of Clarence is supposed to have been drowned in a butt of Malmsey wine. To the right of the middle gate of the Tower is a terrace along the bank of the Thames, and an arch beneath this terrace forms the approach to the Traitors' Gate, shown in this view, through which the water formerly reached to the stairs within the gloomy, low-browed arch which we still see. Here it was that Anne Boleyn was landed for imprisonment in the same room from which she had gone to her coronation, having been hurried hither without warning from a tournament at Greenwich. Here, too, eighteen years after, her, daughter, Elizabeth, stepped on shore, exclaiming: "Here landeth as true a subject, being a prisoner, as ever landed at these stairs; and before thee, 0 God, I speak it." The old stone steps at Traitors' Gate, worn by the feet of so many illustrious prisoners, were torn up during one of the so-called "restorations," and the venerable gates themselves, strong and durable as ever, though worn by the action of ten thousand tides, and green with river-weed were sold for xs. to a small tradesman in Whitechapel, who in turn concluded a splendid "deal" with Barnum, who re-purchased the gates for £50.