lt it would be a relief to see anyone who had been in Australia.
"Now," I thought, "if I walk along City Road and see the name of that
street I'll remember it"--and I did. It was a blind street, like the
long, narrow yard of a jail, walled by dark houses, all alike. The
next door but one to that at which I knocked to inquire was where the
Johnsons lived; they lived in a four-storied house, or rather a narrow
section of a four-storied terrace. I found later on that they paid the
land-lord, or nearly paid him, by letting lodgings. They lived in
one room with the use of the parlour and the kitchen when the lodgers
weren't using them, and the son shared a room with a lodger. The back
windows looked out on the dead wall of a poorhouse of some kind, the
front on rows of similar windows opposite--rows of the same sort of
windows that run for miles and miles in London. In one a man sat
smoking in his shirtsleeves, from another a slavey leaned out watching
a fourwheeler that had stopped next door, in a third a woman sat sewing,
and in a fourth a woman was ironing, with a glimpse of a bedstead behind
her. And all outside was gloom and soot and slush.

I would never have recognized the Johnsons. I have visited them several
times since and their faces are familiar to me now, but I don't know
whether any traces of the old likenesses worked up in my memory. I
found Johnson an old man--old and grey before his time. He had a grizzly
stubble round his chin and cheeks towards the end of the week, because
he could only afford a shave on Saturday afternoon. He was working at
some branch of his trade "in the shop" I understood, but he said he felt
the work come heavier on him every winter. "I've felt very poorly this
last winter or two," he said, "very poorly indeed." He was very sad and
gentle.

Mrs Johnson was old and thin-looking, but seemed cheerful and energetic.
Some chest trouble kept her within doors most of the winter.

"I don't mind so long as I can manage," she said, "but Johnson gets so
depressed."

They seemed very kind towards each other; they spoke little of
Australia, and then only as an incident in their lives which was not of
any importance--had long been past and done with. It was all "before
we went to Australia" or "after we came back from Australia," with Mrs
Johnson.

The son, whom I remembered as a bright, robust little fellow, was now a
tall, white-faced, clean-shaven young man, a clerk on thirty shillings
a w