house-walls, with their juts and angles, and their clambering pipes of
unknown employ, in the middle distance; or, in the foreground, the
skylights of cluttered outbuildings, and the copings of the walls of
grimy backyards, where the sooty trees were making a fight with the
spring, and putting forth a rash of buds like green points of electric
light: the same sort of light that showed in the eyes of a black cat
seasonably appearing under them. Inquiries into English civilization can
always wait, but such passing effects stay for no man, and I put them
down roughly in behalf of a futile philosopher who ought to have studied
them in their inexhaustible detail.

He could not be reproached with insensibility to his domestic
circumstance, from the combination of cook and butler which took him
into its ideal keeping to the unknown, unheard, and unseen German baron
who had the dining-room floor, and was represented through his open door
by his breakfast-trays and his perfectly valeted clothes. The valeting
in that house was unexceptionable, and the service at table was of a
dress-coated decorum worthy of finer dinners than were ever eaten
there. The service throughout was of a gravity never relaxed, except in
the intimate moments of bringing the bath in the morning, when the news
of the day before and the coming events of the present day were
suggestively yet respectfully discussed.

The tenants of the drawing-room floor owed some of their most fortunate
inspirations in sight-seeing to the suggestions of the landlord, whose
apartments I would in no wise leave to depreciatory conjecture. There
was, indeed, always a jagged wound in the entry wall made by some
envious trunk; but there was nothing of the frowziness, the shabbiness
of many of those houses in the streets neighboring Mayfair where many
Americans are eager to pay twice the fee demanded in this house on the