voice and gentle manner had, under the benign influence of its rays, now emerged from the gloom.

As I listened to her talk, studying her personality, I could understand how rich in literary material was the London from which Mr. Dickens drew his characters. She might have stepped out of one of his books, for she unquestionably lived in them. To describe her is impossible. A year has gone by since I saw her, and my memory has grown a little hazy quite natural in London; but the impression remains with me of a certain done-up-in-lavender sort of an old lady, as if she had lived a good many years in one room and been folded up every night and laid away in a bureau drawer. There were ruffles, too, somewhere I think about her throat, and some kind of fluting at the end of two long white cap strings that rested on her thin shoulders; and small shrivelled hands and a quaint bend of her back as she leaned forward to hear me the better. Perhaps a woman of seventy, perhaps eighty, but very gentle and with a motherly touch about her, due, no doubt, to the care she took of the variously stranded young men who occupied her "three pair back."

There was a sister, too, or perhaps a niece

some

some years younger, not a great many, but who chimed in now and then. Rather a bustling, nervous, intense little woman in a shiny black silk, whose whole purpose in life seemed to be to save her companion any undue exertion.

"There," she interrupted, "you've talked enough. No, I'll show the gentleman the knocker. You'll have to get up, sir, and come over to the other side of the room, for it's screwed fast to the wall. It used to be on the front door when Mr. Dickens lived here, and would be there now had they not tried to steal it not once, but half a dozen times So we took it off and bolted it here inside" she was caressing it now tenderly with her hand. "Just think how many times his fingers took hold of it! How often he came in late at night -forgot his key and awoke everybody in the house! until they let him in! Not much of a knocker, as you can see couldn't have cost five shillings when it was new there were a dozen, no doubt, to be found just like it up and down this street many of them are there now. But, you see, it made a great deal of difference whose hand touched it. Try a rap of your own on it, everybody does who comes. The touch of my loyal fingers overlaid the

touch of those of the long ago, and both ladies being satisfied with my devotion, the younger of the two in her rôle of protector laid her own on the old lady's wrist and said rather peremptorily:

"No, I'll show the gentleman the back yard. You've walked enough to-day. I'll just close this blind to keep the sun out. It's coming in now, and there's your shawl and don't sit near the door where there'll be a draught. This way, sir."

I followed through the narrow, old-fashioned brownish hall covered with oilcloth, flanked with old-fashioned mahogany chairs, a jar for old-fashioned wet umbrellas in one corner and a hat-rack in the other, and passed out into a small, cramped, disheartened garden into which was thrust a begrimed, blackened, dilapidated back extension with one large end window large in contrast with the dimensions of the wall in which it was set, as can be seen from my sketch with the window wide open.

"Now, please come over here so you can see the end and the side wall and the roof. Now, right inside of that little bit of a box of a place and it's only one room, as you can see Dickens wrote the last chapters of 'Pickwick.' I can tell you just how big it is it is only ten

Mr.

feet long and eight feet wide and eight feet high, and in one corner next to the hall where we entered is a fireplace, no bigger than a workbasket, holding about two handfuls of coal. His writing-table was moved close to this window, where he could look out onto the garden. Isn't it pitiful to think how he suffered when he was young?"

I looked about me, taking in the low brick wall dividing the burial plot in which I stood from the burial plot next door, noted the starved lilac-bush, robbed of most of its breakable branches by relic hunters, scanned the heaped-up garden bed-not a spear of grass, just heaped-up brown earth like a new-filled grave; counted the pale consumptive flowers, their drooping heads clinging to decrepit stalks and wabbly stems, and then, glancing at the sky, and the brave sun fighting its way through the haze, suddenly remembered it was the leafy month of June. Just such June days were, perhaps, the only days in which he could have worked with the window up, days when some stray bird or lost butterfly might have wandered in, imparting a momentary cheer. But - and here came the chilling thought—what must have been that cramped box of a room in a November fog or a January thaw? He tells us

all about it in "Our Mutual Friend." "A mouldy little plantation, a Cat preserve. Sparrows were there; cats were there, dry rot and wet rot were there."

My inspection over, the little lady in the shiny black silk began again:

66

'And this was not the least of his troubles in this house. His dear sister-in-law Mary died in that room over your head, just beside the roof of this extension. You can see it if you look up. Yes, the poor fellow had many, many troubles when he lived here, and yet during all this time, when his own heart was so sad, he was making everybody laugh the world over.

I thanked my very courteous and sympathetic guide, climbed back into my cab, and started to work not only on the front door, without the famous knocker the one now in use is of bright brass - but its contiguous windows and upper iron balconies.

As I worked on, the several details of my subject took their place on my canvas - the modest sign telling passers-by that this was "The Dickens House" and the tablet affixed to the wall by the London County Council giving the years in which the great novelist occupied it. "The only one of Mr. Dickens's London residences," says Miss Lang in her