and there may be found an alley so
narrow that the neighbours can shake hands, if they would, from
opposite windows. Many of the houses are of three or four stories,
with walls, inside and out, dingy and grimed with smoke, and with
windows that scarcely admit even the gloomy light which finds a way
through the thick atmosphere, and down between the high, close
buildings.

A few years ago in one of these dismal streets there stood a still more
dismal yard, bearing the name of Angel Court, as if there yet lingered
among those grimy homes and their squalid occupants some memories of a
brighter place and of happier creatures. Angel Court was about nine
feet wide, and contained ten or twelve houses on each side, with one
dwelling at the further end, blocking up the thoroughfare, and
commanding a view down the close, stone-paved yard, with its
interlacing rows of clothes-lines stretched from window to window, upon
which hung the yellow, half-washed rags of the inhabitants. This end
house was three stories high, without counting a raised roof of red
tiles, forming two attics; the number of rooms in all being eight, each
one of which was held by a separate family, as were most of the other
rooms in the court. To possess two apartments was almost an
undreamed-of luxury.

There was certainly an advantage in living in the attics of the end
house in Angel Court, for the air was a trifle purer there and the
light clearer than in the stories below. From the small windows might
be seen the prospect, not only of the narrow court, but of a vast
extent of roofs, with a church spire here and there, and the glow of
the sky behind them, when the sun was setting in a thick purplish cloud
of smoke and fog. There was greater quiet also, and more privacy up in
the attics than beneath, where all day long people were trampling up
and down the stairs, and past the doors of their neighbours' rooms.
The steep staircase ended in a steeper ladder leading up to the attics,
and very few cared to climb up and down it. It was perhaps for these
reasons that the wife of a sailor, who had gone to sea eight months
before, had chosen to leave a room lower down, for which he had paid
the rent in advance, in order to mount into higher and quieter quarters
with her three children.

Whatever may have been her reason, it is certain that the sailor's
wife, who had been ailing before her husband's departure, had, for some
weeks past, been unable to descen