--even for a century!--a thing absolutely incredible. Especially
you must have been impressed by the nine-inch wall, in which every other
course at least consists of bats and closures. You will have marvelled
that so large a percentage of bricks can appear to have been delivered
broken; but this you would have been able to account for had you watched
the builder at work, noting his vicious practice of halving a sound
brick whenever he wants a bat. It is an instinct, deep-rooted in
bricklayers, against which unprofessional remonstrance is useless--an
instinct that he fights against with difficulty whenever popular
prejudice calls for full bricks on the face. So when the wall is not to
be rendered in compo or plaster, he just shoves a few in, on the courses
of stretchers, leaving every course of headers to a lifetime of
effrontery. What does it matter to him? But it must be most painful to a
conscientious bat to be taken for a full brick by every passer-by, and
to be unable to contradict it.

Now the real reason why the top wall of No. 7, Sapps Court was bulging
was one that never could surprise anyone conversant to this extent with
nine-inch walls. For there is a weakest point in every such wall, where
the plate is laid to receive the joists, or jystes; which may be
pronounced either way, but should always be nine-inch. For if they are
six-inch you have to shove 'em in nearer together, and that weakens
your wall, put it how you may. You work it out and see if it don't come
out so. So said the builder, Mr. Bartlett, at No. 7, Sapps Court, when
having laid bare the ends of the top-floor joists in Mrs. Prichard's
front attic it turned out just like he said it would--six-inch jystes
with no hold to 'em, and onto that all perished at the ends! Why ever
they couldn't go to a new floor when they done the new roof Mr. Bartlett
could not conceive. They had not, and what was worse they had carried up
the wall on the top of the old brickwork, adding to the dead weight; and
it only fit to pull down, as you might say.

However, the weather was fine and warm all the time Mr. Bartlett rebuilt
two foot of wall by sections; which he did careful, a bit at a time. And
all along, till they took away the scaffolding and made good them two or
three pudlock-holes off of a ladder, they was no annoyance at all to
Mrs. Prichard, nor yet to Mrs. Burr, excepting a little of that sort of
flaviour that goes with old brickwork, and a little of another