on the houses, so that the top rooms were like ovens; but now with the
approach of evening it was cooler, and everyone in Vere Street was out
of doors.

Vere street, Lambeth, is a short, straight street leading out of the
Westminster Bridge Road; it has forty houses on one side and forty
houses on the other, and these eighty houses are very much more like
one another than ever peas are like peas, or young ladies like young
ladies. They are newish, three-storied buildings of dingy grey brick
with slate roofs, and they are perfectly flat, without a bow-window or
even a projecting cornice or window-sill to break the straightness of
the line from one end of the street to the other.

This Saturday afternoon the street was full of life; no traffic came
down Vere Street, and the cemented space between the pavements was
given up to children. Several games of cricket were being played by
wildly excited boys, using coats for wickets, an old tennis-ball or a
bundle of rags tied together for a ball, and, generally, an old
broomstick for bat. The wicket was so large and the bat so small that
the man in was always getting bowled, when heated quarrels would
arise, the batter absolutely refusing to go out and the bowler
absolutely insisting on going in. The girls were more peaceable; they
were chiefly employed in skipping, and only abused one another mildly
when the rope was not properly turned or the skipper did not jump
sufficiently high. Worst off of all were the very young children, for
there had been no rain for weeks, and the street was as dry and clean
as a covered court, and, in the lack of mud to wallow in, they sat
about the road, disconsolate as poets. The number of babies was
prodigious; they sprawled about everywhere, on the pavement, round the
doors, and about their mothers' skirts. The grown-ups were gathered