selected, and in it we began to make constant
research. There are few Londoners of the rising
generation who know those ghastly streets,
solemn and straight, where the daylight at the
height of summer fades at four o'clock, and in
winter only looks in for ail hour about noon;
where the houses, uniform in dirt and dinginess,
in lack of paint on their window-sills, and in
fulness of filth on their windows, stare
confronting each other in twin-like similitude.
Decorum-street, Hessian-street, Walcheren-
square, Great Dettingen-street, each exactly
resembling the other, all equally dreary, equally
deserted, equally heart-breaking, equally genteel.
Even the family could not deny the gentility,
but were good enough to remember having
visited a judge in Culloden-terrace, and having
been at the routs of Lady Flack, wife of Sir
Nicholas Flack, Baronet, Head of the College
of Physicians, and Body-preserver in Ordinary
to the great Georgius of sainted memory. All
the districts just named were a little above my
means, but eventually I settled down into a
house in Great Dowdy-street, a row of small
but very eligible tenements on the Dowdy
estate. None of your common thoroughfares,
to be rattled through by vulgar cabs and earth-
shaking Pickford's vans, but a self-included
property with a gate at each end and a lodge
with a porter in a gold laced hat and the Dowdy
arms on the buttons of his mulberry-coloured
coat, to prevent any one, except with a mission
to one of the houses, from intruding on the
exclusive territory. The rent was seventy pounds
a year, "on a repairing lease" (which means an
annual outlay of from five-and-twenty to thirty
to keep the bricks and mortar and timbers
together), and the accommodation consisted of a
narrow dining-room painted salmon colour, and
a little back room looking out upon a square
black enclosure in which grew fearful fungi; two
big drawing-rooms, the carpeting of which
nearly swallowed a quarter's income; two good
bedrooms, and three attics. I never went into
the basement save when I visited the cellar,
which was a mouldy vault under the street
pavement only accessible through the area, and
consequently rendering any one going to it liable to
the insults of rude boys, who would grin through
the area-railings, and say, "Give us a drop,
guv'nor;" or, "Mind you don't drop the bottle,
old 'un;" and other ribald remarks—but I
believe the kitchen was pronounced by the
servants to be "stuffy," and the whole place
"ill conwenient," there being no larder, pantry,
nor the usual domestic arrangements. I know,
too, that we were supposed to breed and
preserve a very magnificent specimen of the black-
beetle, insects which migrated to different parts
of the house in droves, and which, to the number
of five-and-twenty being met slowly ascending
the drawing-room stairs, caused my wife to
swoon, and me to invest money in a hedgehog: an
animal that took up his abode in the coal-cellar
on the top of the coals, and, retiring thither early
one morning after a surfeit of beetles, was
supposed to have been inadvertently "laid" in the
fire by the cook in mistake for a lump of Walls-
end.

I don't think there were many advantages in
the Great Dowdy-street house (though I was
very happy there, and had an immense amount
of fun and pleasure) beyond the proximity to
my work, and the consequent saving in cab hire
and fatigue. But I do recollect the drawbacks;
and although six years have elapsed since I
experienced them, they are constantly rising in my
mind. I remember our being unable ever to
open any window without an immediate inroad of
"blacks:" triturate soot of the most penetrating
kind, which at once made piebald all the anti-
macassars, toilet-covers, counterpanes, towels,
and other linen; I remember our being unable to
get any sleep after five A.M., when, at the
builder's which abutted on our black enclosure,
a tremendous bell clanged, summoning the
workmen to labour, and from which time there
was such a noise of sawing, and hammering,
and planing, and filing, and tool grinding,
and bellows blowing, interspersed with strange
bellowings in the Celtic tongue from one Irish
labourer to another, and mingled with objurgations
in pure Saxon from irate overseers, that
one might as well have attempted a quiet nap
in the neighbourhood of Babel when the tower
was in course of erection. I remember, on the
first occasion of our sleeping there, a horrible
yell echoing through the house, and being
discovered to proceed from the nurse aforenamed,
who had, at the time of her shrieking, about
six A.M., heard "ghostes a burstin' in through
the walls." We calmed her perturbed spirit,
finding no traces of any such inroads, but
were aroused in a similar manner the next
morning, and then discovered that the rushing
in of the New River supply, obedient to the
turncock's key, was the source of the young
person's fright. I remember the hot summer
Sunday afternoons, when the pavement would
be red-hot, and the dust, and bits of straw, and
scraps of paper would blow fitfully about with
every little puff of air, and the always dull
houses would look infinitely duller with their
blinds down, and no sound would fall upon the
ear save the distant hum of the cabs in Holborn,
or the footfall of some young person in service
going to afternoon church—or to what was, in
her mind, its equivalent—in all the glory of open-
worked stockings, low shoes, and a prayer-book
swaddled in a white cotton pocket-handkerchief.
I have sat at my window on scores of such
Sundays, eyeing the nose of Lazarus over the
dwarf Venetian blinds opposite, or the gorgeous
waistcoat of Eliason, a little higher up (for the
tribes are great in the neighbourhood). I
have stared upward to catch a glimpse of the
scrap of blue unclouded sky, visible above the
houses; and then I have thought of Richmond
Hill; of snowy tablecloths, and cool Moselle-cup,
and salmon cutlets, in a room overhanging the
river at the Orkney Arms, at Maidenhead; of
that sea breeze which passes the little hotel at
Freshwater Bay, in wild hurry to make play over
the neighbouring downs; of shaded walks, and