strange walks through the Square, run like rabbits in a
warren to their respective doors; stand there, and stare. Tony Widger's
house is the largest. Once, when Under Town was Seacombe, a lawyer
lived here--hence the front passage. It has a cat-trodden front garden,
in which only wall-flowers and some box edging have survived. Over the
front door is a broken trellis-work porch. Masts and spars lean against
the wall. The house is built of red brick, straight up and down like an
overgrown doll's house, but the whole of the wall is weathered and
toned by the southerly gales which blow down the Gut from the open sea.
Those same winds see to it that Alexandra Square does not smell
squalid, however it may look. At its worst it is not so depressing as a
row of discreet semi-detached villas. It is, I should imagine, a pretty
accurate mirror of the lives that are lived in it--poor men's lives
that scarcely anybody fathoms. If one looks for a moment at a house
where people have starved, or are starving.... What a gift of hope they
must possess--and what a sinking in their poor insides!

4

This morning they told me how my little hunchbacked Commodore died. He
had been ailing, they said; had come to look paler and more pinched in
his small sharp face. Then (it was a fisherman who told me this): "He
was in to house one morning, an' I thought as 'e were sleepin', an' I
said, 'Harry, will 'ee hae a cup o' tay; yu been sleeping an't 'ee?'
An' 'e says, 'No, I an't; but I been sort o' dreaming.' An' 'e said as
he'd see'd a green valley wi' a stream o' water, like, running down the
middle o' it, an' 'e thought as 'e see'd Granfer there (that us losted
jest before 'en) walking by the stream. A'terwards 'e sat on 's
mother's lap, like 's if 'e wer a child again, though 'e wer nearly
nineteen all but in size; an' 'e jest took an' died there, suddent an'
quiet like; went away wi'out a word; an' us buried 'en last January up
to the cementry on land."

So the _Moondaisy_'s luckiest fisherman packed up and went.

5

It is astonishing how hungry and merry these children are, especially
the boys. They rush into the kitchen at meal times and immediately make
grabs at whatever they most fancy on the table.

[Sidenote: _MAN AND GEN'LEMAN_]

"Yu little cat!" says their mother, always as if she had never
witnessed such behaviour before. "Yu daring rascal! Put down! I'll gie
thee such a one in a minute. Go an' sit down to once." Then they