A front door is then determined upon; and you think you have at length, by a little stretch of your purse, reached the very perfection of comfort. But alas! “_fronti nulla fides_,” which is as much as to say, there is no reliance to be placed on a front door. It is true, you escape all the evils of your former habitation, and that nothing can match your back kitchen as a convenience to the servants. But then the family living above you has twice your number of children; and these imps seem to do nothing whatever the whole day long, from six in the morning till seven at night, but run pat, pat, pat, along the floors overhead, till they almost drive you mad, _non vi sed sæpe cadendo_. Even the charms of a back-green, or a superior scullery, will not stand against this; and so you determine at last to go to an upper flat in the same neighbourhood, where you may have the pleasure of tormenting some person below with _your_ children, without the risk of being at the same time tormented yourself. The last selection is made upon moderate and prudent principles; but yet hope is also even here upon the wing. The house has no pretensions to style or external gentility, but yet “Edwin was no vulgar boy.” The stair is remarkably spacious and well lighted, and has, further, the advantage of a door at the bottom, which can be opened by any inhabitant, by means of a pulley, without the necessity of descending to the bottom. In fact, it is what I would call a genteel stair. “The Stevensons” live in the first _flat_. The kitchen door has a nice hole at the lower corner for the cat; and what a delightful place there is by the side of the fire for the lamp, or where we could keep our salt dry in a _pig_! The request of the Regent Earl of Mar, as inscribed on the front of his house at Stirling, “I pray all lukaris on this ludging With gentil ee to gif their judging,”