that had been squeezed, at some
remote period of English History, into a fashionable neighbourhood
at the west end of the town, where it stood in the shade like a poor
relation of the great street round the corner, coldly looked down
upon by mighty mansions. It was not exactly in a court, and it was
not exactly in a yard; but it was in the dullest of No-Thoroughfares,
rendered anxious and haggard by distant double knocks. The name of this
retirement, where grass grew between the chinks in the stone pavement,
was Princess's Place; and in Princess's Place was Princess's Chapel,
with a tinkling bell, where sometimes as many as five-and-twenty people
attended service on a Sunday. The Princess's Arms was also there, and
much resorted to by splendid footmen. A sedan chair was kept inside the
railing before the Princess's Arms, but it had never come out within the
memory of man; and on fine mornings, the top of every rail (there were
eight-and-forty, as Miss Tox had often counted) was decorated with a
pewter-pot.

There was another private house besides Miss Tox's in Princess's
Place: not to mention an immense Pair of gates, with an immense pair of
lion-headed knockers on them, which were never opened by any chance, and
were supposed to constitute a disused entrance to somebody's stables.
Indeed, there was a smack of stabling in the air of Princess's Place;
and Miss Tox's bedroom (which was at the back) commanded a vista of
Mews, where hostlers, at whatever sort of work engaged, were continually
accompanying themselves with effervescent noises; and where the most
domestic and confidential garments of coachmen and their wives and
families, usually hung, like Macbeth's banners, on the outward walls.'

At this other private house in Princess's Place, tenanted by a retired
butler who had married a housekeeper, apartments were let Furnished, to
a single gentleman: to wit, a wooden-featured, blue-faced Major, with
his eyes starting out of his head, in whom Miss Tox recognised, as she
herself expressed it, 'something so truly military;' and between whom
and herself, an occasional interchange of newspapers and pamphlets,
and such Platonic dalliance, was effected through the medium of a dark
servant of the Major's who Miss Tox was quite content to classify as a
'native,' without connecting him with any geographical idea whatever.

Perhaps there never was a smaller entry and staircase, than the entry
and staircase of Miss Tox's house