distinguished for its social splendour, but existence in it was
picturesque, varied, exciting, full of accidents, as existence is apt to
be in residences that cost their occupiers an average of three shillings
a week. Some persons referred to the quarter as a slum, and ironically
insisted on its adjacency to the Wesleyan chapel, as though that was the
Wesleyan chapel's fault. Such people did not understand life and the joy
thereof.

The solitary cottage had a front yard, about as large as a blanket,
surrounded by an insecure brick wall and paved with mud. You went up two
steps, pushed at a door, and instantly found yourself in the principal
reception-room, which no earthly blanket could possibly have covered.
Behind this chamber could be seen obscurely an apartment so tiny that an
auctioneer would have been justified in terming it "bijou," Furnished
simply but practically with a slopstone; also the beginnings of a
stairway. The furniture of the reception-room comprised two chairs and a
table, one or two saucepans, and some antique crockery. What lay at the
upper end of the stairway no living person knew, save the old woman who
slept there. The old woman sat at the fireplace, "all bunched up," as
they say in the Five Towns. The only fire in the room, however, was in
the short clay pipe which she smoked; Mrs Hullins was one of the last
old women in Bursley to smoke a cutty; and even then the pipe was
considered coarse, and cigarettes were coming into fashion--though not
in Chapel Alley. Mrs Hullins smoked her pipe, and thought about nothing
in particular. Occasionally some vision of the past floated through her
drowsy brain. She had lived in that residence for over forty years. She
had brought up eleven children and two husbands there. She had coddled
thirty-five grand-children there, and given instruction to some
half-dozen daughters-in-law. She had known midnights when she could
scarcely move in that residence without disturbing somebody asleep. Now