are never opened. Indeed, a generation or two of painters have painted
them shut, and grime and dirt have laid their seals upon the hinges. A
side gate gives entrance to such as come on foot. A door in the wall,
up an alley, is labelled "Tradesman's Entrance," but the tradesmen never
linger there. No merry milkman leaves the latest gossip with his thin,
blue milk on that threshold. The butcher's chariot wheels never tarry at
the corner of that alley. Indeed, the local butcher has no chariot. His
clients mostly come in a shawl, and take their purchases away with them
wrapped in a doubtful newspaper beneath its folds. The better-class
buyers wear a cloth cricketing cap, coquettishly attached to a knob of
hair by a hat-pin.

The milkman, moreover, is not a merry man, hurrying on his rounds. He
goes slowly and pessimistically, and likes to see the halfpenny before
he tips his measure.

This, in a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could
live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it--a
noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a
family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as
a quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash,
and an elderly lady of weak intellect was sent by her relations to live
in it, with two servants, who were frequently to be met in Gravesend in
the evening hours, at which time, it is to be presumed, the elderly lady
of weak intellect was locked in the Signal House alone. But the house
never had a ghost. Haunted houses very seldom have. The ghost was the
mere invention of some kitchen-maid.

Haunted or not, the house stood empty for years, until suddenly a
foreigner took it--a Russian banker, it was understood. A very nice,