bottom of which children swarmed, uncleanly and unwholesome, and women
gossiped and wrangled as they hung out dingy rags to dry. The fierce sun
shone on it all, and on Percival as he leant at his window surveying it
with disgust, yet something of fascination too. "I fancied the sun
wouldn't seem so bright in holes like this," he mused. "I thought
everything would be dull and dim. Instead of which, he glares into every
cranny and corner, as if he were pointing at all the filth and squalid
misery, and makes it ten times more abominable." Nor did the slanting
rays light up anything pleasant and fresh in the bedroom itself. It was
shabby and small, with coarsely-papered walls and a discolored ceiling.
Percival remarked that his window had a very wide sill. He never found
out the reason, unless it were intended that he should take the air by
sitting on it and dangling his legs over the foulest of water-butts. But
when night came the broad sill was the favorite battlefield for all the
cats in the neighborhood. It might have been pointed out as readily as
they point you out the place where the students fight at Heidelberg.

From his sitting-room he looked on a melancholy street. The
unsubstantial houses tried to seem--not respectable, no word so honest
could be applied to them, but--genteel, and failed even in that
miserable ambition. Percival used to watch the plastered fronts, flaking
in the sun and rain, old while yet new, with no grace of bygone memory
or present strength, till he fancied that they might be perishing of
some foul leprosy like that described in Leviticus. And the wearisome
monotony! They were all just alike, except that here and there one was a
little dingier than its neighbors, with the railings more broken and the
windows dirtier. One day, when his landlady insisted on talking to him
and Percival was too courteous to be absolutely silent, he asked where
the prospect was from which the street took its name. She said they used
to be able to see Three-Corner Green from their attic-windows. In her
mother's time there was a tree and a pond there, she believed, and she
herself could remember it quite green, a great place for Cheap Jacks and
people who preached and sold pills. But now it was all done away with
and built over. It was Paradise Place, and Paradise Place wasn't much of
a prospect, though there might be worse. But it was no detriment to Mr.
Thorne's rooms, for it was only the attic that ever had the