ntic and I am rather proud of
it. My chambers are on the second floor, and are backed by an anxiously
polite street between which and mine are little yards called, I think,
gardens. They are so small that if you have the tree your neighbour has
the shade from it. I was looking out at my back window on the day
we have come to when whom did I see but the whilom nursery governess
sitting on a chair in one of these gardens. I put up my eye-glass to
make sure, and undoubtedly it was she. But she sat there doing nothing,
which was by no means my conception of the jade, so I brought a
fieldglass to bear and discovered that the object was merely a lady's
jacket. It hung on the back of a kitchen chair, seemed to be a furry
thing, and, I must suppose, was suspended there for an airing.

I was chagrined, and then I insisted stoutly with myself that, as it
was not Mary, it must be Mary's jacket. I had never seen her wear such
a jacket, mind you, yet I was confident, I can't tell why. Do clothes
absorb a little of the character of their wearer, so that I recognised
this jacket by a certain coquetry? If she has a way with her skirts that
always advertises me of her presence, quite possibly she is as cunning
with jackets. Or perhaps she is her own seamstress, and puts in little
tucks of herself.

Figure it what you please; but I beg to inform you that I put on my
hat and five minutes afterward saw Mary and her husband emerge from the
house to which I had calculated that garden belonged. Now am I clever,
or am I not?

When they had left the street I examined the house leisurely, and a
droll house it is. Seen from the front it appears to consist of a door
and a window, though above them the trained eye may detect another
window, the air-hole of some apartment which it would be just like
Mary's grandiloquence to call her bedroom. The houses on each side of
this bandbox are tall, and I discovered later that it had once been
an open passage to the back gardens. The story and a half of which it
consists had been knocked up cheaply, by carpenters I should say rather
than masons, and the general effect is of a brightly coloured van that
has stuck for ever on its way through the passage.

The low houses of London look so much more homely than the tall ones
that I never pass them without dropping a blessing on their builders,
but this house was ridiculous; indeed it did not call itself a house,
for over the door was a board with the inscrip