About the beginning of the last century, the Old Causeway presented an aspect which, though a little less rural than at present, was still more picturesque. An irregular line of houses thrust forward their gables on either side, like two parties of ill-trained cavalry drawn up for the charge;--some jutted forward, others slunk backward, some slanted sideways, as if meditating a retreat, others, as if more decided, seemed in the act of turning round. They varied in size and character, from the little sod-covered cottage, with round moor stones sticking out of its mud walls, like skulls in the famous pyramid of Malta, to the tall narrow house of three storeys, with its court and gateway. Between every two buildings there intervened a deep narrow close, bounded by the back of one tenement and the front of another, and terminating in a little oblong garden, fringed with a deep border of nettles, and bearing in the centre plots of cabbage and parsnips;--the latter being a root much used before the introduction of the potato. Here and there a gigantic ash or elm sprung out of the fence, and shot its ponderous arms over the houses. A low door, somewhat under five feet, and a few stone steps which descended from the level of the soil to that of the floor (for the latter was invariably sunk from one to three feet beneath the former), gave access to each of the meaner class of buildings. One little window, with the sill scarcely raised above the pavement, fronted the street, another, still smaller and equally low, opened to the close: they admitted through their unbevelled apertures and diminutive panes of brownish-yellow, a sort of umbery twilight, which even the level sunbeams, as they fell at eve or morn in long rules athwart the motty atmosphere within, scarce served to dissipate. An immense chimney, designed for the drying of fish, which formed the staple food of the poorer inhabitants, stretched from the edge of the window in the gable to near the opposite wall; and on the huge black lintel were inscribed, in rude characters, the name of the builder of the tenement, and that of his wife, with the date of the erection. The walls, naked and uneven, were hollowed in several places into little square recesses, termed _bowels_ or _boles_; and at a height of not more than six feet above the floor, which was formed of clay and stone, and marvellously uneven, were the bare rafters varnished over with smoke.