ave advanced
steadily to a point perhaps far beyond that which we have yet
attained, then, if at all, may we trouble ourselves about the
question--'Who shall rule the waves?'

NUMBER NINETEEN IN OUR STREET.

Number Nineteen in our street is a gloomy house, with a blistered door
and a cavernous step; with a hungry area and a desolate frontage. The
windows are like prison-slips, only a trifle darker, and a good deal
dirtier; and the kitchen-offices might stand proxies for the Black
Hole of Calcutta, barring the company and the warmth. For as to
company, black beetles, mice, and red ants, are all that are ever seen
of animated nature there, and the thermometer rarely stands above
freezing-point. Number Nineteen is a lodging-house, kept by a poor old
maid, whose only friend is her cat, and whose only heirs will be the
parish. With the outward world, excepting such as slowly filter
through the rusty opening of the blistered door, Miss Rebecca Spong
has long ceased to have dealings. She hangs a certain piece of
cardboard, with 'Lodgings to Let,' printed in school-girl print,
unconscious of straight lines, across it; and this act of public
notification, coupled with anxious peepings over the blinds of the
parlour front, is all the intercourse which she and the world of men
hold together. Every now and then, indeed, a mangy cab may be seen
driving up to her worn-out step; and dingy individuals, of the kind
who travel about with small square boxes, covered with marbled paper,
and secured with knotted cords of different sizes, may be witnessed
taking possession of Nineteen, in a melancholy and mysterious way. But
even these visitations, unsatisfactory as most lodging-house keepers
would consider them, are few and far between; for somehow the people
who come and go never seem to have any friends or relations whereby
Miss Spong may improve her 'connection.' You never see the postman
stop at that desolate door; you never hear a visitor's knock on that
rusty lion's head; no unnecessary traffic of social life ever takes
place behind those dusty blinds; it might be the home of a select
party of Trappists, or the favourite hiding-place of coiners, for all
the sunshine of external humanity that is suffered to enter those
interior recesses. If a murder had been committed in every room, from
the attics to the cellar, a heavier spell of solitude and desolation
could not rest on its floors.

One dreary afternoon in November, a ca