Keeping to the right, round the Tower, I
found the moat quite surrounded by a fence of iron rails, excluding me
from a pleasant gravel-path, among flowers and shrubbery, on the inside,
where I could see nursery-maids giving children their airings. Possibly
these may have been the privileged inhabitants of the Tower, which
certainly might contain the population of a large village. The aspect of
the fortress has so much that is new and modern about it that it can
hardly be called picturesque, and yet it seems unfair to withhold that
epithet from such a collection of gray ramparts. I followed the iron
fence quite round the outer grounds, till it approached the Thames, and
in this direction the moat and the pleasure-ground terminate in a narrow
graveyard, which extends beneath the walls, and looks neglected and
shaggy with long grass. It appeared to contain graves enough, but only a
few tombstones, of which I could read the inscription of but one; it
commemorated a Mr. George Gibson, a person of no note, nor apparently
connected with the place. St. Katharine's Dock lies along the Thames, in
this vicinity; and while on one side of me were the Tower, the quiet
gravel-path, and the shaggy graveyard, on the other were draymen and
their horses, dock-laborers, sailors, empty puncheons, and a
miscellaneous spectacle of life,--including organ-grinders, men roasting
chestnuts over small ovens on the sidewalk, boys and women with boards or
wheelbarrows of apples, oyster-stands, besides pedlers of small wares,
dirty children at play, and other figures and things that a Dutch painter
would seize upon.
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