AN INTERESTING DISCOVERY

Evening Post, Volume L, Issue 42, 17 August 1895, Page 1 (Supplement)

AN INTERESTING DISCOVERY

Sir George Grey has told a London correspondent an interesting story concerning himself, Martin's Bank, and the old apple woman of Change Alley which will bear repetition. It seems that in years gone by, when Lombard-street was quite a fashionable place to live in, and Sir George had but newly acquired the gentle art of reading, he used to spend a considerable portion of the year in the room above Martin's Bank. Whenever his elders wanted to be rid of him for a space, they relegated him to a little room which looked out into Change Alley and commanded a full view of the good things upon the old apple-woman's fruit-stall. In the room, there were bookshelves, and the little library included volumes of " Cook's Voyages," " Dampier's Voyages," and sundry other works dealing with the wonders of the Southern Seas. Sir George stumbled through these volumes, and then, his imagination fired by the strange things they contained, and the sights of the foreign fruits on the stall in the Alley, would dream of the day when he would own an orchard of his own in the far-off lands of which he had read. It was the hours spent in the little room overlooking Change Alley which shaped little George Grey's destiny. They mapped out a career for him, and he followed up the visions of his youthful day-dreamß till they became realities. Eighty years hava passed since then. Lom-bard-street is no longer a fashionable quarter, but Martin's Bank still nourishes, and though Change Alley has been somewhat altered, it still boasts a fruit-stall, kept by the son of the old woman of Sir George's infancy, and the little room overlooking it remains intact. On his recent visit to Overbury, Sir George spoke of the many happy, if solitary, hours he had spent in the room, and asked if the library still existed. No

one ever remembered that Martin's Bank possessed snn.h books as those Sir George mentioned, and his friends believed that the old man's memory was playing him a trick. But Sir George was confident, and finally persuaded one of the junior partners to pay a visit to the chamber. They found it full of old banking records, musty and time-stained, but searching in the far corner of the room, suddenly came upon the bookshelves which Sir George had remembered as being there in his youth. In them were the very books little George Grey had so often fingered. Brought to light, and the dust of years removed, the volumes were discovered to be in a good state of preservation.. It is needless to say that the find revived many pleasant memories in the mind of the veteran statesman.