the house at the corner had contemplated doing the same. At Zion View
lived and still lives Mr. Moggridge, the huge, good-natured, guffawing
pillar of New Zion,--on whom, at the moment, however, we will not call.

A nice dull place, you may say, from which to issue invitations to a
romance. Well, of course, it must seem so if pretty places are the
reader's idea of romance. Curiously enough, the preference of the Lady
Romance herself is for just such dull places. These dreary,
soot-begrimed streets are the very streets she loves best to appear in,
on a sudden, some astonished day, with a sound of silk skirts and a
spring wind of attar of roses. Contrast, surprise,--these are her very
soul. Dull places and bright people,--these she loves to bring together,
and watch for laughter and tears. You are never safe from Romance, and
the place to seek her is never the place where she was last found.

Well, at all events, it is to Gasometer Street and New Zion that you are
respectfully invited, and before you decline the invitation with a
shrug, I will tell you this about the gasometer. The romantic eyes of
one of the greatest French poets once looked on that gasometer! I won't
pretend that they dwelt there, but look on it they once did--the eyes of
that great, sad, scandalous, religious French poet--on a night of weary
rain that set someone quoting,--also in that street,--

"Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville."

Yes, and that French poet passed the gasometer on his way to New Zion.
Actually.

Romance! Why, I wouldn't exchange Gasometer Street for the Isles of