Bram and Nancy found exceptionally pleasant lodgings in Greenwich. Starboard Alley was a row of diminutive Georgian houses running down to the river and overlooking at the back the grounds of the Trinity Hospital. The bow windows which gave just such a peep of the wide Thames as one may get of the sea itself in little streets that lead down to ancient harbours, had no more than a genteel and unobtrusive curve; it was the very place in which an outward-bound mariner would have felt safe in leaving his wife to wait for his return. Starboard Alley was too narrow for vehicles, so that there was never any sound there but of the footsteps of people walking past on their way to stroll along the embankment above the river—a pleasant place, that embankment, even in this cold December weather, with the seagulls wheeling and screaming overhead and the great ships coming home on the tide, coming home for Christmas on the flowing tide. Not only was the house in Starboard Alley itself attractive, but Mrs. Pottage, the landlady, was as much a feature of it as the bow window, though, to say truth, she had a more obtrusive curve. She was a widow of forty years’ standing, her husband, a gunner in one of Her Majesty’s ships having been killed off Sebastopol; but she was still comely with her fresh complexion and twinkling eyes, and her heart was young. “I was hardly eighteen at the time my poor husband vanished out of this world,” she told her lodgers, “and the offers of marriage I’ve had since—well, I assure you the men have always been round me like flies after sugar. But I’ve never melted like sugar does in the heat. I said ‘no’ to the first in 1855 within four months of my pore William’s death—well, it was death and burial all in one as you might say, because he’d been talking to his mate as cheerful as a goldfinch the moment before and the next moment there was nothing of him left. It was his mate I said ‘no’ to, four months later, when he was invalided home with a wooden leg. He was the first, and I said ‘no’ to the last only yesterday afternoon just before tea—a Mr. Hopkins he is, a ship’s chandler in a small style of business with a head like the dome of the Observatory, but no more in it than an empty eggshell. Oh, I ashore you I gave him a very firm ‘no,’ and he went back to his chandling as dumb as a doornail. Yes, you might really call it quite a hobby of mine refusing eligibles. I used to put the dates down in the butcher’s book or the baker’s book as the case might be, but I got charged for them one year as extra loaves and ever since then I’ve kept the dates in my head. Off to rehearsal now, are you? Well, fancy them having a rehearsal on Christmas Eve. I call that making a great demand on anybody’s good nature. In fact, if anybody didn’t mind being a bit vulgar, it’s what they might call blooming sauce. And you’ll leave your little girl with me? What’s her name, Letishyer? Said with a sneeze, I