One knows that sort of house, I say, and likewise the gentle, murmuring press of sufferers which lays siege to it. But the spot-cash practitioners of Mile End Road are rather strange and foreign to us. We do not go into their little, weird consulting-hatches nor sweat amid the tumult of their vulgar patrons. We can imagine what the thing is like: and there are some of us perhaps who imagine truthfully. I didn’t. My imagination did not run to Japanese colour prints and pastel studies, and neatly framed examples of the art of Mr. Nicholson. And yet these things were hung upon the white distempered walls of Dr. Brink’s infirmary. I figured the tumult as gazing speechlessly upon these curious East End substitutes for Landseer. "What do they think of them?" I asked the doctor. "They are much amused," said he. We were standing before a pastel when he spoke—a thing of heavy shadows with purple deeps, wherefrom there stood forth dimly the figures of a crippled man and an old sick woman, and the face of a child with brazen eyes. "Out Patients" was the title of this drawing, and it preached of a divine torture. "They are much amused," said the doctor. But this was in the morning. That night we did not look at pictures, nor at patients. We sat above and supped off duck and Burgundy. I saw confusedly—it was a pleasant confusion—that there were many good pictures in the house, and that books were everywhere—everywhere. And the bottle was a full one. And we spoke of olives and the Norfolk women. Then he took me to a little brown room with more books in it, and a bedstead which was of oak and carven. "Good-night," said the doctor. "You shall see old James to-morrow. You will like old James. Good-night." * * * * * When morning came, I had the pleasure of viewing Bovingdon Street in the sunshine. It was a queer sort of sunshine, to be sure—weak and uncertain and rather dirty: a sort of actinic heel-taps. But I remember thinking that any less shabby form of sunshine would have carried with it an air of disrespect, as though it had come forth to mock at the gloom and ugliness of the thing beneath it. A gloomier, sillier, dirtier street than Bovingdon Street I do not wish to see. But I have seen such all the same. Indeed, I have looked upon some filth and squalor beside which Bovingdon Street is as the Mall compared to Worship Street. So much I must admit in common fairness.