oftenest fixed on the window which I have been
describing. It is then that, the room being
lighted up, the shadows of things and persons
within it are thrown upon the blind with a
clearness and distinctness which those who have
never observed such matters would hardly credit.
The shadows tell me, then, that the room is
tenanted by a husband and wife both young, I
am certain. The man, as I gather from his
position, and what I take to be the shadow of a
tissue-paper screen behind which he stoops over
his labour, is a poor drudging engraver for
whom the days are not long enough, sitting
cramped up at his patient toil through many
hours of the night. As I watch him, he will
rise and stretch back his head to relieve the
muscles of his neck, and then I see that the
shadow thrown on the blind is that of a young
figure, spare but well made. The light shows
me also that he wears a beard; it is a very
strong light indeed, and this makes me more
sure than ever that he is an engraver. The
shadow of his wife is there beside him—almost
always. How she watches over and tends him,
how she hangs over his chair, or kneels
beside him! I had never, at the time I speak
of, seen her, but I could not help fancying
that she was pretty and good enough to light
up a darker room than that in which she
lives, and to make her husband's life of toil—
if he can keep it up—not only bearable but
delightful.

IF he can keep it up—but can he? His
shadow is all that I have seen of him, but it
looks like the shadow of one in delicate health.
I never miss him from his place at night, and I
can see the edge of his blind by which he works,
at his window all day. "If he sits drudging
there," thought I, "he will surely, as is the case
in all excess, defeat his own object and end in
being disabled altogether."

It was not long before I began to fear that
what I had apprehended had taken place. There
came a day when the blind was not drawn up to
let in the light on the engraver's work, but
remained drawn down the whole day. It would
be difficult to express how anxiously I longed
for the evening, and the shadows which should
tell me more.

That evening the light was burning in the
room as usual, but the straight-edge of the
engraver's blind was not seen cutting against it.
There was the shadow of but one person, it was
that of a woman, and as the figure which cast it
moved so quietly about, I could make out that
she was pouring out drugs and mixing the
different compounds wanted in a sick-room by the
light of the lamp. Sometimes she would pause
in these occupations and look towards one end
of the room, where I concluded the bed was
placed; and sometimes I could even imagine,
but this must have been pure fancy, that, looking
still in the same direction, her lips would
move at times, and that she was speaking. I
could even see her tasting the food she was
mixing, with her head a little on one side; altering
and tasting it often before she carried it across
the room to where, I felt sure, the sick man lay.
So much will shadows tell.

From my front window I can see a long way
up and down the street, even to that corner
where the early breakfast depôt is found every
morning—a poor stall enough, and driving a
poor business, I should have thought; a business,
however, in which I am so deeply
interested that my first morning act is to go to the
window and see if the poor old proprietor has
got a customer—nay, once I put on a pilot-coat
and a wideawake hat to appear in character, and
purchased a cup of his coffee, which was a sound
coffee enough, though a little gritty, and
perhaps a thought weak. Enough of that. I can
see to the coffee-stall one way, and nearly as far
the other, and at the back I command a bit of a
court, two mewses and a half, and, by great
dislocation of neck, a little scrap of Brewer-street,
Golden-square. Now in all these regions which
are continually under my eye, I have noticed
one constantly pervading presence, one figure
which comes upon the scene without fail every
day in the year and at all conceivable hours. It
is the figure of a tallish gentleman of about five-
and-thirty, who stoops a little, has a very round
back, wears spectacles, is always dressed in a
buttoned black frock-coat, is always in a hurry,
always expected anxiously at the houses he
visits, and always followed to the door, on coming
out again, by some who question him eagerly as
he leaves them, and who seem to seek for
comfort in his most inscrutable face. Of course I
have not watched this gentleman's proceedings
long, without coming to the conclusion that it is
Mr. Cordial, the parish doctor, whose surgery in
Great Pulteney-street I am so often in. the habit
of passing.

If there had been any previous doubt on my
mind as to the state of things in the house
opposite, it would at once have been put to flight
when, on the day succeeding that evening on
which I had watched the engraver's wife in her
capacity of nurse, I caught a dark glimpse of
this gentleman's head (rather a bald head for so
young a man) at the window of the room
opposite, which he had come to, to prepare some
mixture or other.

"Now here," I thought to myself, "is a
pretty business. This is just what I feared.
Here is this poor fellow laid up, unable to work,
and probably not only ill in body, but harassed
in mind by the consciousness that as long as he
is ill, there can be no money coming in to
supply the daily expenses which, however poorly
they live, he and his wife must of necessity
incur."

I thought over this matter, and turned it all
sorts of ways, as people who are unlucky
enough, or unwise enough, to live alone do
turn and twist things, and was so haunted by
the thought of what was going on in the room
opposite, that in the course of the afternoon I
was obliged to go out and take a long walk, in
order to fill up the time that must necessarily
intervene before the lamp would be lit, and the
shadows thrown upon the blind. When I got