reets, made of two drab walls
upon which the level lines, formed by the precisely even window-sills
and doorsteps, stretch in weary perspective from end to end, suggesting
petrified diagrams proving dead problems--stands a house that ever draws
me to it; so that often, when least conscious of my footsteps, I awake
to find myself hurrying through noisy, crowded thoroughfares, where
flaring naphtha lamps illumine fierce, patient, leaden-coloured faces;
through dim-lit, empty streets, where monstrous shadows come and go
upon the close-drawn blinds; through narrow, noisome streets, where the
gutters swarm with children, and each ever-open doorway vomits riot;
past reeking corners, and across waste places, till at last I reach the
dreary goal of my memory-driven desire, and, coming to a halt beside the
broken railings, find rest.

The house, larger than its fellows, built when the street was still
a country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of
individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is
encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a
barren patch of stones and dust where clothes--it is odd any one should
have thought of washing--hang in perpetuity; while about the door
continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has left
exposed in all its naked insincerity.

Occasionally I drift hitherward in the day time, when slatternly women
gossip round the area gates, and the silence is broken by the
hoarse, wailing cry of "Coals--any coals--three and sixpence a
sack--co-o-o-als!" chanted in a tone that absence of response has
stamped with chronic melancholy; but then the street knows me not, and
my old friend of the corner, ashamed of its shabbiness in the unpitying
sunlight, turns its face away, and will not see me as I pass.

Not until the Night, merciful alone of all things to the ugly, draws her
veil across its sordid features will it, as some fond old nurse, sought
out in after years, open wide its arms to welcome me. Then the teeming
life it now shelters, hushed for a time within its walls, the flickering
flare from the "King of Prussia" opposite extinguished, will it talk
with me of the past, asking me many questions, reminding me of
many things I had forgotten. Then into the silent street come the
well-remembered footsteps; in and out the creaking gate pass, not seeing
me, the well-remembered faces; and we talk concerning them; as two
cronies, turning t