blossom from his back windows; but they exist nearly everywhere in
London, and a more spacious privacy can always be secured where two
houses throw their gardens together, as sometimes happens.

The humblest, or at least the next to the humblest, London house has
some leafy breathing-place behind it where the birds may nest and sing,
and our lodging in the street which was almost Belgravian was not
without its tree and its feathered inmates. When the first really warm
days came (and they came at the time appointed by the poets), the
feathered hostess of the birds, in a coop under the tree, laid an egg in
honor of her friends building overhead. This was a high moment of
triumph for the landlord's whole family. He happened to be making some
very gravelly garden-beds along the wall when the hen proclaimed her
achievement, and he called his children and their mother to rejoice with
him. His oldest boy ran up a flag in honor of the event, and his lodgers
came to the window to enjoy the scene, as I am sure the royal princess
would have done if she had been taking tea there that afternoon.

He was a good man, that landlord, and a kind man, and though his
aspirates were dislocated, his heart, however he miscalled it, was in
the right place. We had many improving conversations, by which I
profited more than he; and he impressed me, like Englishmen of every
class, as standing steadfastly but unaggressively upon the rights of his
station. In England you feel that you cannot trespass upon the social
demesne of the lowliest without being unmistakably warned off the
premises. The social inferiors have a convention of profound respect for
the social superiors, but it sometimes seemed provisional only, a mask
which they expected one day to drop; yet this may have been one of those
errors which foreigners easily make. What is certain is that the
superior had better keep to his place, as the inferior keeps to his.