Last Thursday, the Queen, in the absence of the King
opened the new Spitalfields market. The City Corp- oration is expending some.£2,000,000 on its construction, and when completed it will occupy an area even greater than the ten acres that were opened by Her Majesty. Large slum areas have had to be cleared, and their inhabitants transferred to new blocks near by to make room for the market, so that the people of Spitalfields would seem to have benefited by its construction quite apart from the extra employment that it has given to everyone and the prospect of further employment in the fruit trade. In the King's Speech reference was made to the fact that 25 per cent. of our fruit imports come from the Dominions as against 13 per cent. before the War— an interesting comment on the development of Empire trade. Her Majesty afterwards reopened the Old Hall at Lincoln's Inn. The hall has just been rebuilt brick by brick, and is, as far as possible, as it was in the days of Henry VII. It has reappeared, a very beautiful vision, from behind the dreadful plaster in which an insensitive age had placed it. The Court of Chancery used to sit in the hall and it was therefore the imagined scene of the grotesque delays which weighed upon the Jarndyce wards in Bleak House and of Miss Flite's satirical ejaculation, " Judgment is coming. So is the Day of Judgment ! " ' *
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