II The Home at Highgate 37 



places — but still the terrace said that on a dark 

 night the chances were that a policeman might be 

 found asleep in one of the outhouses in that wild 

 country, and a burglar awake in another. The 

 terrace never said it wished, but it confidently 

 asserted its belief, that some day the inhabitants of 

 the little house would all be found in the morning 

 with their throats cut. This prophecy, however, 

 never came off, possibly because its mistress was 

 known to be an excellent revolver shot, and to keep 

 a lot of dogs ; possibly because the grounds were 

 not quite so much a dormitory for policemen as the 

 terrace held them to be. 



In front, the house — it had then no name or 

 number, and had to be called to the uninitiated 

 'next door to the Baptist chapel' — had only one 

 front window : a window which gazed benignly, yet 

 not without a glint of sarcasm, on the pale-faced men 

 bearing black bags who passed by morning and 

 evening with unvarying regularity on their ways to 

 and from ' business in the city.' If you succeeded 

 in penetrating into its interior you found in every 

 room curiosities, from all manner of strange places, 

 battling for space with the Transactions of half-a- 

 dozen learned societies and books innumerable on 

 all manner of strange subjects, as joyously as trees 

 battle for life-space in a tropical forest : so that when 

 a chair had at length been disencumbered for you of 

 Darwin on The Expression of the Emotions, The 

 Kabbala Denudata, Tristravi Shandy, the profes- 



