. Perhaps, taken altogether, from top
to bottom, it was the most inconvenient little house in England, and the
crookedest; but then, Miss Tox said, what a situation! There was very
little daylight to be got there in the winter: no sun at the best of
times: air was out of the question, and traffic was walled out. Still
Miss Tox said, think of the situation! So said the blue-faced Major,
whose eyes were starting out of his head: who gloried in Princess's
Place: and who delighted to turn the conversation at his club, whenever
he could, to something connected with some of the great people in the
great street round the corner, that he might have the satisfaction of
saying they were his neighbours.

In short, with Miss Tox and the blue-faced Major, it was enough for
Princess's Place--as with a very small fragment of society, it is enough
for many a little hanger-on of another sort--to be well connected, and
to have genteel blood in its veins. It might be poor, mean, shabby,
stupid, dull. No matter. The great street round the corner trailed off
into Princess's Place; and that which of High Holborn would have become
a choleric word, spoken of Princess's Place became flat blasphemy.

The dingy tenement inhabited by Miss Tox was her own; having been
devised and bequeathed to her by the deceased owner of the fishy eye
in the locket, of whom a miniature portrait, with a powdered head and
a pigtail, balanced the kettle-holder on opposite sides of the parlour
fireplace. The greater part of the furniture was of the powdered-head
and pig-tail period: comprising a plate-warmer, always languishing
and sprawling its four attenuated bow legs in somebody's way; and an
obsolete harpsichord, illuminated round the maker's name with a painted
garland of sweet peas. In any part of the house, visitors were usually
cognizant of a prevailing mustiness; and in warm weather Miss Tox
had been seen apparently writing in sundry chinks and crevices of
the wainscoat with the the wrong end of a pen dipped in spirits of
turpentine.

Although Major Bagstock had arrived at what is called in polite
literature, the grand meridian of life, and was proceeding on his
journey downhill with hardly any throat, and a very rigid pair
of jaw-bones, and long-flapped elephantine ears, and his eyes and
complexion in the state of artificial excitement already mentioned, he
was mightily proud of awakening an interest in Miss Tox, and tickled his
vanity with the fiction th