The house, larger than its fellows, built when the street was still a
country lane, edging the marshes, strikes a strange note of
individuality amid the surrounding harmony of hideousness. It is
encompassed on two sides by what was once a garden, though now but a
barren patch of stones and dust where clothes--it is odd any one
should have thought of washing--hang in perpetuity; while about the
door continue the remnants of a porch, which the stucco falling has
left exposed in all its naked insincerity.

Occasionally I drift hitherward in the day time, when slatternly women
gossip round the area gates, and the silence is broken by the hoarse,
wailing cry of "Coals--any coals--three and sixpence a
sack--co-o-o-als!" chanted in a tone that absence of response has
stamped with chronic melancholy; but then the street knows me not, and
my old friend of the corner, ashamed of its shabbiness in the
unpitying sunlight, turns its face away, and will not see me as I
pass.

Not until the Night, merciful alone of all things to the ugly, draws
her veil across its sordid features will it, as some fond old nurse,
sought out in after years, open wide its arms to welcome me. Then the
teeming life it now shelters, hushed for a time within its walls, the
flickering flare from the "King of Prussia" opposite extinguished,
will it talk with me of the past, asking me many questions, reminding
me of many things I had forgotten. Then into the silent street come
the well-remembered footsteps; in and out the creaking gate pass, not
seeing me, the well-remembered faces; and we talk concerning them; as
two cronies, turning the torn leaves of some old album where the faded
portraits in forgotten fashions, speak together in low tones of those