anywhere. The
window sashes had to be made air-tight by wedges of wood or paper stuck
into the frames; a bell in Dull Street rarely sounded after less than
six pulls; there was scarcely a sitting-room but had a crack in its
grimy ceiling, or a handle off its ill-hung door, or a strip of wall-
paper peeling off its walls. There were more chairs in the furnished
apartments of Dull Street with three legs than there were with four, and
there was scarcely horsehair enough in the twenty-four sofas of its
twenty-four parlours to suffice for an equal quantity of bolsters.

In short, Dull Street was the shabbiest genteel street in the
metropolis, and nothing could make it otherwise.

A well-built, tastefully-furnished house in the middle of it would have
been as incongruous as a new patch in an old garment, and no one dreamt
of disturbing the traditional aspect of the place by any attempt to
repair or beautify it.

Indeed, the people who lived in Dull Street were as much a part of its
dulness as the houses they inhabited. They were for the most part
retired tradesmen, or decayed milliners, or broken-down Government
clerks, most of whom tried to eke out their little pensions by letting
part of their lodgings to others as decayed and broken-down as
themselves.

These interesting colonists, whose one bond of sympathy was a mutual
seediness, amused themselves, for the most part, by doing nothing all
day long, except perhaps staring out of the window, in the remote hope
of catching sight of a distant cab passing the street corner, or
watching to see how much milk their opposite neighbour took in, or
reading the news of the week before last in a borrowed newspaper, or
talking scandal of one neighbour to another.

"Jemima, my dear," said a middle-aged lady, who, with her son and
daughter, was the proud occupant of Number 4, Dull Street--"Jemima, my
dear, I see to-day the bill is hout of the winder of number six."

"Never!" replied Jemima, a sharp-looking young woman of twenty, who had
once in her life spent a month at a ladies' boarding-school, and was
therefore decidedly genteel. "I wonder who's coming."

"A party of three, so I hear from Miss Moulden's maid, which is niece to
Mrs Grimley: a widow,"--here the speaker snuffled slightly--"and two
childer--like me."

"Go on!" said Jemima. "Any more about them, ma?"

"Well, my dear, I do hear as they 'ave come down a bit."

"Oh, ah! lag!" put in the speaker's son, a lawy