On hearing the cerise bonnet begin to shout again, the small boy put the mouth-organ in his pocket and looking up in the air shouted “Hi!” too. Two little girls dragging behind them a child of doubtful sex smeared with barley sugar stopped to gaze, and then three more small boys arrived on the scene and proceeded to augment the duet of “Hi!” A policeman, who had been lured from Dean Street into Blackboy Passage by the noise, inquired of the cerise bonnet what its need was. “Can’t you get into your house, mum?” “No, I can’t. I want to visit a lady friend of mine who lives at 5 Blackboy Passage, and when I rung the bell a female like a potted shrimp poked her head out of a top-floor window and asked me if I wanted Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit.” “Mr. Blanchit lives at number five,” one of the small boys volunteered. “Down in the basement, he lives.” “Well, what’s that got to do with you, you pushing little eel? I don’t want the man. I want to see my lady friend.” “Perhaps you’ve got the wrong number,” the policeman suggested. “Wrong number be ... well, I won’t say what I was thinking, because it doesn’t always do.” It was at this moment that Letizia, who had been trying vainly for an hour after dinner to make her mother play with the gilded antelopes, decided to look out of the window. “Muvver! Muvver!” she shouted, clapping joyful hands. “I can see Mrs. Porridge in the street, and she’s talking to a policeman.” Nancy jumped up, and ran to the window. “Why, so it is! Dear, dear Mrs. Pottage! I’ll go down and open the door.” “There you are!” Mrs. Pottage exclaimed triumphantly to the policeman after she had embraced Nancy. “Didn’t I tell you my lady friend lived here?” The policeman strode off with a good-natured smile: the small boy took the mouth-organ out of his pocket and, after watching the policeman safely through the archway of the Tavern, resumed his interrupted tune. The two little girls, without looking to see if the sugar-smeared neutral was ready to be dragged on again, moved forward on their way. The three other small boys discovered a new method of wearing out boots and set off to practise it. Mrs. Pottage and Nancy retired into Number Five. Blackboy Passage was once more abandoned to its Sabbath emptiness and silence. “Well, you do live in a Punch and Judy show and no mistake,” Mrs. Pottage declared, as she followed Nancy up the stairs, the jet bugles of her best bonnet tinkling and lisping as she moved. “My landlady doesn’t like being called down to open the door; and the girl’s out,” Nancy explained. “Landlady you call her? Skylady I should call her. That is if I called her a lady at all, and which I most certainly never shouldn’t not if I lived to be as old as Methussalem.” Letizia was waiting at the head of the stairs to welcome Mrs. Pottage, into whose outspread arms she flung herself in a rapture of welcome. “Mrs. Porridge! Mrs. Porridge!” “My heart’s jool!”