seeing that the streets of Cloisterham city are little more than
one narrow street by which you get into it and get out of it: the
rest being mostly disappointing yards with pumps in them and no
thoroughfare--exception made of the Cathedral-close, and a paved
Quaker settlement, in colour and general confirmation very like a
Quakeress's bonnet, up in a shady corner.

In a word, a city of another and a bygone time is Cloisterham, with
its hoarse Cathedral-bell, its hoarse rooks hovering about the
Cathedral tower, its hoarser and less distinct rooks in the stalls
far beneath. Fragments of old wall, saint's chapel, chapter-house,
convent and monastery, have got incongruously or obstructively
built into many of its houses and gardens, much as kindred jumbled
notions have become incorporated into many of its citizens' minds.
All things in it are of the past. Even its single pawnbroker takes
in no pledges, nor has he for a long time, but offers vainly an
unredeemed stock for sale, of which the costlier articles are dim
and pale old watches apparently in a slow perspiration, tarnished
sugar-tongs with ineffectual legs, and odd volumes of dismal books.
The most abundant and the most agreeable evidences of progressing
life in Cloisterham are the evidences of vegetable life in many
gardens; even its drooping and despondent little theatre has its
poor strip of garden, receiving the foul fiend, when he ducks from
its stage into the infernal regions, among scarlet-beans or oyster-
shells, according to the season of the year.

In the midst of Cloisterham stands the Nuns' House: a venerable
brick edifice, whose present appellation is doubtless derived from
the legend of its conventual uses. On the trim gate enclosing its
old courtyard is a resplendent brass plate flashing forth the