To a foreign visitor—or even to a good many Englishmen—there would be so much in these sights that was odd, and so much about the atmosphere that was gloomy, eldritch, and macabre, that he might easily over-look one or two peculiar phænomena. But the sort of person who attended Hanging-Marches eight times a year would note an anomalous gathering near an elbow in the road between Sir John Oldcastle’s (a compound of stately buildings and trees, about to be enveloped by Clerkenwell) and Black Mary’s Hole (a tiny alienated settlement on the banks of the upper Fleet).