ntryside. The dull workmen's streets that here abruptly
present unfinished ends to the universe must console themselves with the
gasometer. And indeed they seem more than content. For a street boasting
the best view, as it runs out its sordid line longer than the rest, is
proudly called Gasometer Street. Some of the streets that are denied the
gasometer cluster narrow and dark, hardly built twenty years perhaps,
yet long since drearily old,--with the unattractive antiquity of old
iron and old clothes,--round a mouldy little chapel, in what we can only
describe as the Wesleyan Methodist style of architecture. Cased in
weather-stained and decaying stucco, it bears upon its front the words
"New Zion," and the streets about it are named accordingly: Zion
Passage, Zion Alley, Zion Walk, Zion Street. There is a house too which
had been lucky enough to call itself Zion View, the very morning before
the house at the corner had contemplated doing the same. At Zion View
lived and still lives Mr. Moggridge, the huge, good-natured, guffawing
pillar of New Zion,--on whom, at the moment, however, we will not call.

A nice dull place, you may say, from which to issue invitations to a
romance. Well, of course, it must seem so if pretty places are the
reader's idea of romance. Curiously enough, the preference of the Lady
Romance herself is for just such dull places. These dreary,
soot-begrimed streets are the very streets she loves best to appear in,
on a sudden, some astonished day, with a sound of silk skirts and a
spring wind of attar of roses. Contrast, surprise,--these are her very
soul. Dull places and bright people,--these she loves to bring together,
and watch for laughter and tears. You are never safe from Romance, and
the place to seek her is never the place where she was last found.

Well, at all events, it is to Gasometer Street and New Zion that you are
respectfully invited, and before you decline the invitation with a
shrug, I will tell you this about the gasometer. The romantic eyes of
one of the greatest French poets once looked on that gasometer! I won't
pretend that they dwelt there, but look on it they once did--the eyes of
that great, sad, scandalous, religious French poet--on a night of weary
rain that set someone quoting,--also in that street,--

"Il pleure dans mon coeur
Comme il pleut sur la ville."

Yes, and that French poet passed the gasometer on his way to New Zion.
Actually.

Romance! Why, I w