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, we hurried to discover it. We were in luck. It was all that we could have asked: as simple in architecture, its bricks as time-stained, as the courts of the Temple or Gray's Inn. The front door opened into a hall twisted with age, the roof supported by carved corbels, the upper part of another door at its far end filled with bull's-eye glass, while three flights of time-worn, white stone stairs led to the windows with, behind them, a flat called Chambers, as if we were really in the Temple, and decorated by Adam, as if to bring Our House into harmony with the younger houses around it. For Our House it became on that very day, now years ago. Our House it has been ever since, and I hope we are only at the beginning of our adventures in it. Of some of the adventures that have already fallen to our share within Our House, I now venture to make the record, for no better reason perhaps than because at the time I found them both engrossing and amusing. The adventures out of Our Windows--adventures of cloud and smoke and sunshine and fog--J. has been from the beginning, and is still, recording, because certainly he finds them the most wonderful of all. If my text shows the price we pay for the beauty, the reproductions of his paintings, all made from Our Windows, show how well that beauty is worth the price. 'Enrietter [Illustration: "IN WINTER THE GREAT WHITE FLIGHTS OF GULLS"] Our House And London out of Our Windows I 'ENRIETTER 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 it been a question of choice.