when you did go in, and you came to a
step. If you did not tumble owing to the suddenness and depth of this
step, you came to another; and were stupefied by reaching the ground
four inches sooner than you expected, and made conscious that your
skeleton had been driven an equal distance upwards through your system.
Then you could see Sapps Court, but under provocation, from its entry.
When you recovered your temper you admitted that it was a better Court
than you had anticipated.

All the residences were in a row on the left, and there was a dead wall
on the right with an inscription on a stone in it that said the ground
twelve inches beyond belonged to somebody else. This wall was in the
confidence of the main street, lending itself to a fiction that the
houses therein had gardens or yards behind them. They hadn't; but the
tenants believed they had, and hung out chemises and nightgowns and
shirts to dry in the areas they built up their faith on; and really, if
they were properly wrung out afore hung up there was nothing to complain
of, because the blacks didn't hold on, not to crock, but got shook off
or blew away of theirselves. We put this in the language of our
informant.

However, the story has no business on the other side of this wall. What
concerns it is the row of houses on the left.

If ever a row of houses bore upon them the stamp of having been
overtaken and surrounded by an unexpected city, these did. The wooden
palings that still skirted the breathing-room in front of them almost
said aloud to every newcomer:--"Where is the strip of land gone that we
could see beyond, day by day; that belonged to God-knows-who; whose
further boundary was the road the haycarts brought their loads on, drawn
by deliberate horses that had bells?" The persistent sunflowers that
still struggled into being behind them told tales of how big they were
in youth, years ago, when they could turn to the sun and hope to catch
his eye. The stray wallflowers murmured to all who had ears to
hear:--"This is how we smelt in days gone by--but oh!--so much
stronger!" The wooden shutters, outside the ground-floors that really
stood upon the ground, told, if you chose to listen, of how they kept
the houses safe from thieves in moonlit nights a century ago; and the
doors between them--for each house was three windows wide--opened
straight into the kitchen. So they were, or had been, cottages. But the
miscreant in possession twenty years ago, i