"Now," said I to myself, as I looked at the knocker, "I know I am not a
Proctor; I wonder whether I am a Rogue!"

Upon the whole, though Conscience reproduced two or three pretty faces
which might have had smaller attraction for a moral Goliath than they had
had for me, who am but a Tom Thumb in that way, I came to the conclusion
that I was not a Rogue. So, beginning to regard the establishment as in
some sort my property, bequeathed to me and divers co-legatees, share and
share alike, by the Worshipful Master Richard Watts, I stepped backward
into the road to survey my inheritance.

I found it to be a clean white house, of a staid and venerable air, with
the quaint old door already three times mentioned (an arched door),
choice little long low lattice-windows, and a roof of three gables. The
silent High Street of Rochester is full of gables, with old beams and
timbers carved into strange faces. It is oddly garnished with a queer
old clock that projects over the pavement out of a grave red-brick
building, as if Time carried on business there, and hung out his sign.
Sooth to say, he did an active stroke of work in Rochester, in the old
days of the Romans, and the Saxons, and the Normans; and down to the
times of King John, when the rugged castle--I will not undertake to say
how many hundreds of years old then--was abandoned to the centuries of
weather which have so defaced the dark apertures in its walls, that the
ruin looks as if the rooks and daws had pecked its eyes out.

I was very well pleased, both with my property and its situation. While
I was yet surveying it with growing content, I espied, at one of the
upper lattices which stood open, a decent body, of a wholesome matronly
appearance, whose eyes I caught inquiringly addressed to mine. They said
so plainly, "Do you wish to see the house?" that I answered aloud, "Yes,