n "that part of Holborn
christened High," is as little aware of the neighborhood of Leather Lane
and what it stands for, as the New Yorker on Broadway is of Mulberry
Street and the Great Bend. For either or both, entrance is entrance into
a world quite unknown to decorous respectability, and, if one looks
aright, as full of wonders and discoveries as other unknown countries
under our feet. Out of Leather Lane, with its ancient houses swarming
with inhabitants and in all stages of decay and foulness, open other
lanes as unsavory, through which the costers drive their barrows,
chaffering with dishevelled women, who bear a black eye or other token
that the British husband has been exercising his rights, and who find
bargaining for a bunch of turnips or a head of cabbage an exhilarating
change.

There were many costers and many barrows, but among them all hardly one
so popular as "old Widgeon," who had been in the business forty years;
and as he had chosen to remain a bachelor, an absolutely unheard-of
state of things, he was an object of deepest interest to every woman in
Leather Lane and its purlieus. It was always possible that he might
change his mind; and from the oldest inhabitant down to the child just
beginning to ask questions, there was always a sense of expectation
where Widgeon was concerned. He, in the meantime, did his day's work
contentedly, had a quick eye for all trouble, and in such cases was sure
to give overweight, or even to let the heavy penny or two fall
accidentally into the purchase. His donkey had something the same
expression of patient good-humored receptivity. The children climbed
over the barrow and even on the donkey's back, and though Widgeon made
great feint of driving them off with a very stubby whip, they knew well
that it would always just miss them, and returned day after day
undismayed. He "did for himself" in a garret in a dark little house, up
a darker court; and here it was popularly supposed he had hidden the
gains of all these forty years. They might be there or in the donkey's
stable, but they were somewhere, and then came the question, who would
have them when he died?

To these speculations Nan listened silently, in the pauses of the
machines on which her mother and three other women stitched trousers.
Nothing was expected of her but to mind the baby, to see that the fire
kept in, just smouldering, and that there was always hot water enough
for the tea. On the days when they a