With Illustrations by Joseph Pennell Boston and New York Houghton Mifflin Company The Riverside Press Cambridge 1912...

COPYRIGHT, 1910, BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL COPYRIGHT, 1912, BY JOSEPH PENNELL ALL RIGHTS RESERVED To Augustine...

Our finding Our House was the merest chance. J. and I had been hunting for it during weeks and months, from Chelsea to Blackfriars, when one day, on the way to take a train on the Underground, we saw the notice "To Let" in windows just where they ought to have been,—high above the Embankment and the River,—and we knew at a glance that we should be glad to spend the rest of our lives looking out of them. But something depended on the house we looked out from, and, while our train went without us,

Since my experience with 'Enrietter, the pages of Zola and the De Goncourts have seemed a much more comfortable place for "human documents" and "realism" than the family circle. Her adventures in our London chambers make a thrilling story, but I could have dispensed with the privilege of enjoying the thrill. When your own house becomes the scene of the story you cannot help taking a part in it yourself, and the story of 'Enrietter was not precisely one in which I should have wanted to figure had

Until I began my search for an elderly woman who never drank anything stronger than tea, I had supposed it was the old who could find nobody to give them work. But my trouble was to find somebody old enough to give mine to. The "superior domestics" at the Registry Offices were much too well trained to confess even to middle age, and probably I should be looking for my elderly woman to this day, had not chance led Trimmer one afternoon to an office which I had left without hope in the morning. As

For the third time since we had taken our chambers, I was servantless, and I could not summon up courage to face for the third time the scorn which the simple request for a "general" meets in the English Registry Office. That was what sent me to try my luck at a French Bureau in Soho, where, I was given to understand, it was possible to inquire for, and actually obtain, a good bonne à tout faire and escape without insult. Louise was announced one dull November morning, a few days later. I found

I took over the charwoman with our chambers, and a great piece of luck I thought it; for charwomen never advertise, and are unheard of in Registry Offices. It was certain I could not get into the chambers without one, and at that early stage of my housekeeping in London I should not have known where in the world to look for her. Mrs. Maxfielde was the highly respectable name of the woman who had "done" for the previous tenant, and had she heard of Mr. Shandy's theory of names she could not have

She drifted in from the Quartier , but the slovenliness and shabby finery of her dress made it hard to believe she was French. It was harder to believe she was grown up when she began to talk, for her voice was that of a child, a high shrill treble, with a babyish lisp, losing itself in giggles. And she was so short, so small, that she might easily have passed herself off as a little girl, but for the marks experience had left upon her face. I suppose she was not much under thirty when she first

No housekeeper could have been more in place than the little old white-haired woman who answered our ring the day we came to engage our windows, and, incidentally, the chambers behind them. She was venerable in appearance and scrupulously neat in her dress, and her manner had just the right touch of dignity and deference, until we explained our errand. Then she flew into a rage and told us in a tone that challenged us to dispute it, "You know, no coal is to be carried upstairs after ten o'clock

It had taken years for the Old Housekeeper to mature, and I knew that in the best sense of the word she could never be replaced. But the knowledge did not prepare me for the New Housekeeper. Mrs. Haines was a younger and apparently stronger woman, but she was so casual in her dress, and so eager to emulate the lilies of the field, as to convince me that it was not in her, under any conditions, to mature into a housekeeper at all. It expressed much, I thought, that while the Old Housekeeper had a

I know our Beggars by their ring. When the front door-bell is pulled with insolent violence, "That," I say to myself, "is a Beggar," and I am usually right. Ours are not the Beggars of whose decay Elia complained; though he could not have believed that the art of begging was in any more danger of being lost than the art of lying. His sort have still their place at the crowded crossing, at the corners of streets and turnings of alleys—they are always with us. I rarely go out that I do not meet th

It is impossible to live in chambers without knowing something of the other tenants in the house. I know much even of several who were centuries or generations before my time, and I could not help it if I wanted to, for the London County Council has lately set up a plaque to their memory on our front wall. Not that I want to help it. I take as much pride in my direct descent from Pepys and Etty as others may in an ancestor on the Mayflower or with the Conqueror, while if it had not been for J. a

My windows command the Quarter, and what they do not overlook, Augustine does. Some people might think there could not be much to overlook, for the Quarter is as quiet and secluded as the Inns of Court. J. is forever boasting that if he is in London he is not of it, and that he lives the simple life, with Charing Cross just round the corner. The "full tide of existence" sweeps by, seldom overflowing into the Quarter, which is one of the most difficult places in all the town to find for those who