hand. Of a sudden he
turned and said sharply:

'Well, are you goin' to take it or not?'

Pennyloaf sighed and nodded.

'Got a 'apenny?' he asked.

'No.'

He fetched a cloth, rolled the articles in it very tightly, and pinned
them up; then he made out ticket and duplicate, handling his pen with
facile flourish, and having blotted the little piece of card on a box
of sand (a custom which survives in this conservative profession), he
threw it to the customer. Lastly, he counted out one shilling and
fivepenee halfpenny. The coins were sandy, greasy, and of scratched
surface.

Pennyloaf sped homewards. She lived in Shooter's Gardens, a picturesque
locality which demolition and rebuilding have of late transformed. It
was a winding alley, with paving raised a foot above the level of the
street whence was its main approach. To enter from the obscurer end,
you descended a flight of steps, under a low archway, in a court itself
not easily discovered. From without, only a glimpse of the Gardens was
obtainable; the houses curved out of sight after the first few yards,
and left surmise to busy itself with the characteristics of the hidden
portion. A stranger bold enough to explore would have discovered that
the Gardens had a blind offshoot, known simply as 'The Court.' Needless
to burden description with further detail; the slum was like any other
slum; filth, rottenness, evil odours, possessed these dens of
superfluous mankind and made them gruesome to the peering imagination.
The inhabitants of course felt nothing of the sort; a room in Shooter's
Gardens was the only kind of home that most of them knew or desired.
The majority preferred it, on all grounds, to that offered them in a
block of model lodgings not very far away; here was independence, that
is to say, the liberty to be as vile as they pleased. How they came to
love vileness, well, that is quite another matter, and shall not for
the present concern us.

Pennyloaf ran into the jaws of this black horror with the indifference
of habit; it had never occurred to her that the Gardens were fearful in
the night's gloom, nor even that better lighting would have been a
convenience. Did it happen that she awoke from her first sleep with the
ring of ghastly shrieking in her ears, that was an incident of too
common occurrence to cause her more than a brief curiosity; she could
wait till the morning to hear who had half-killed whom. Four days ago
it was her own mother's turn