laid your breakfast in the
front room."

Thither I went with a book and no uncertain feeling of disappointment.

[Sidenote: _BREAKFAST IN THE PARLOUR_]

The front room looks out upon Alexandra Square. It is, at once,
parlour, lumber room, sail and rope store, portrait gallery of
relatives and ships, and larder. It is a veritable museum of the
household treasures not in constant use, and represents pretty
accurately, I imagine, the extent to which Mrs Widger's house-pride is
able to indulge itself. But I have had enough at Salisbury of eating my
meals among best furniture and in the (printed) company of great minds.
The noise in the kitchen sounded jolly. Now or never, I thought. So
after breakfast, I returned to the kitchen and asked for what bad
behaviour I was banished to the front room.

"Lor'! If yu don't mind this. On'y 'tis all up an' down here...."

3

I went yesterday to see my old landlady at Egremont Villas. She asked
me where I was lodging.

"At Tony Widger's, in Alexandra Square."

"Why, that's in Under Town."

"Yes, in Under Town."

"Oh, law! I can't think how you can live in such a horrid place!"

On my assuring her that it was not so very horrid, she rearranged her
silken skirts on the chair (a chair too ornamentally slight for her
weight) and tilted up her nose. "I must get and lay the table," she
said, "for a lady and gentleman that's staying with me. _Very_ nice
people."

[Sidenote: _ALEXANDRA SQUARE_]

Under Town has, in fact, an indifferent reputation among the elect. Not
that it is badly behaved; far from it. The shallow-pated resent its not
having drawn into line with their cheap notions of progress. If Under
Town had put plate-glass windows into antique buildings.... Visitors to
Seacombe, not being told, hardly so much as suspect the existence of
its huddled old houses and thatched cottages. The shingle-paved Gut
runs down unevenly from the Shore Road between a row of tall lodging
houses and the Alexandra Hotel, then opens out suddenly into a little
square which contains an incredible number of recesses and sub-corners,
so to speak, with many more doors in them than one can discover houses
belonging to the doors. Two cottages, I am told, have no ground floors
at all. Cats sun themselves on walls or squat about gnawing fish bones.
A houdan cockerel with bedraggled speckly plumage and a ragged crest
hanging over one eye struts from doorstep to doorstep. The children,
when any one