As each rook knows its nest among the scores on the straight uniform beeches, so doubtless each inhabitant could after a time distinguish his own house in this monotonous series, even without looking at the number, provided that there was light and that he was not drunk. Each house had three storeys, the first of them bay-windowed, above the basement. Probably each was divided between two, or, like No. 497, between three, families. Who had the upper storeys I never knew, except that there was an old woman who groaned on the stairs, a crying baby and its mother, and some men. I heard them speak, or cry, or tread the stairs lightly or heavily, but never happened to see any of them, unless that woman was one who was going to enter the gate at the same time as I one evening, but at the sight of me went past with a jug of something half hid under her black jacket. The basement, the floor above, and the garden, were rented to one family, viz., Mr Torrance, his wife and four children. The garden was a square containing one permanent living thing, and one only, an apple tree which bore large fluted apples of palest yellow on the one bough remaining green among the grey barkless ones. All round the tree the muddy gravel had been trodden, by children playing, so hard that not a weed or blade of grass ever pierced it. Up to it and down to it led two narrow and steep flights of steps, the lower for the children and the mother ascending from the kitchen or living room, the upper for Mr Torrance who used to sit in the back room writing books, except in the mornings when he taught drawing at several schools. He wrote at an aged and time-worn black bureau, from which he could sometimes see the sunlight embracing the apple tree. But into that room the sunlight could not enter without a miracle, or by what so seldom happened as to seem one--the standing open of an opposite window just so that it threw a reflection of the late sun for about three minutes. Even supposing that the sunlight came that way, little could have penetrated that study; for the French windows were ponderously draped by tapestry of dark green with a black pattern, and on one side the bureau, on the other a bookcase, stood partly before the panes. No natural light could reach the ceiling or the corners. Instead of light, books covered the walls, books in a number of black-stained bookcases of various widths, all equal in height with the room, except one that was cut short by a grate in which I never saw a fire. The other few interspaces held small old pictures or prints in dark frames, and a dismal canvas darkened, probably, by some friendly hand. Most of the books were old, many were very old. The huge, blackened slabs of theology and drama emitted nothing but gloom. The red bindings which make some libraries tolerable had been exorcised from his shelves by the spirits of black and of darkest brown.