The little houses were built in the sober and staid style introduced during the reign of Her Gracious Majesty Queen Anne (now deceased). The architect had taken a slily humorous delight in making them miniature copies of much more pretentious town mansions. Each little house had its elaborate door with a shell-shaped lintel; each had its miniature front-garden, divided from the road-way by elaborate iron railings; and each had an ornate iron gate with link-extinguisher complete. You might have thought the houses were meant to be inhabited by very small Dukes, so stately were they in their tiny way. The ground-floor sitting-rooms all had bow-windows, and in each bow-window the occupants displayed their dearest treasures, generally under a glass globe. A glance at these would almost have been enough to tell you what manner of people their owners were. In the first, at the top corner of the crescent, stood the model of a man-of-war. The second displayed a silver cup with the arms of the City of London carefully turned outward for the passer-by to admire respectfully; the third showed a stuffed canary; the fourth was empty—I will tell you why later; the fifth presented a pinchbeck snuff-box, and in the sixth there was an untidy pile of old books. In front of the crescent lay a delightful lawn, always admirably kept. Jim, Sir Peter Antrobus’s man, mowed it regularly every Saturday afternoon. This lawn was protected on the river-side by a chain hanging from white posts. You never saw posts so white as those were, for every Saturday evening Jim—a very active old sailor in spite of his stiff leg—gave them a fresh coat of paint; he even went so far as to paint the chain as well. [Illustration: JIM,—A VERY ACTIVE OLD SAILOR IN SPITE OF HIS STIFF LEG] In the lower corner of the lawn, and facing the bend of the river, stood what the inhabitants of the Walk called the Gazebo, a little shelter formed by a well-trimmed boxwood hedge, in which was a rustic seat. Sir Peter Antrobus and Mr. Brooke-Hoskyn would sit there on warm summer evenings and discuss the news of the day—or, let me rather say—the news of the day before yesterday; for the only journal they saw was a three days old "Globe" which Sir Peter’s cousin sent him when he had done with it, and when he thought of it. The great charm of the Gazebo was that it was sufficiently removed from the houses to ensure strict privacy: the ladies of the Walk, who shared fully in their sex’s attribute of curiosity, could neither see nor hear what went on in its seclusion, and Sir Peter, who thought he was a woman-hater, was all the more fond of it on that account. In his own house he really could not talk at his ease, for his voice had, by long struggles against gales, acquired a tremendous carrying power; the party-wall was very thin, and his next-door neighbour, Mrs. Poskett, was—or, at least, so he imagined—always listening.