We climbed the winding staircase and stood in the garret where the dictionary had been written, a long, low-ceiled room with small curtained windows, one end of which was chill with the approach of dusk, whilst the other was warmed by slant beams of a red sun shining amongst the crowding chimney-pots and telephone wires. I pictured on some such afternoon Johnson's six amanuenses busy at their part in the great work, and wondered whether they knocked off at dusk. The Doctor, in his rusty brown suit and his "little old shrivelled unpowdered wig, his black worsted stockings ill drawn up and his unbuckled shoes," would probably be busy with them. Perhaps he would be, as Boswell once found him, "covered with dust and buffeting his books," whilst Mrs. Hannah Williams in the room downstairs waited at the tea table. Presently the Doctor would go down and they would drink tea by the light of the fire. What would they talk about? Boswell describes the blind lady as "a woman of more than ordinary talents and literature," and the two might have discussed some contribution Johnson had in his mind for "The Literary Magazine"--"A Free Inquiry into the Nature and Origin of Evil," perhaps, or his "Essay on Tea". "I suppose no person ever enjoyed with more relish the infusion of that fragrant leaf than Johnson," says Boswell, and as Mrs. Darling shares with myself the Doctor's weakness, I proposed an adjournment to Temple Tea Rooms--if we could extricate ourselves from the maze surrounding Gough Square. And so we left the tall, flat-fronted, eighteenth-century house as the lights were coming out in the offices all round. At the printers' windows compositors were busy setting up type, and the printing machines had no peace from their treadmill labour. But no sound issued from Number 17, and no face appeared at any one of the long narrow windows. "Even if you 'adn't told me, sir, I should 'ave known that wos a empty house," announced Mrs. Darling, as she stared meditatively at the Queen Anne front, and the roof line against the reddening sky. "Why?" I enquired. "Oh, I dunno 'ow I know, but I _do_ know." Mrs. Darling begins, you will see, to display signs of imagination. It would not surprise me to learn that she belongs to the class of "mute inglorious" Miltons. Hers may be:-- "Hands, that the rod of empire might have swayed, Or waked to ecstasy the living lyre." I shared her feeling about the place, and as we stood taking a final look it occurred to me that such houses are pathetic attempts to assuage a wistful craving for things that have passed. Perhaps, though, it is in their very failure that they score. If one could put back the centuries and meet the real selves of all those people about whom one had been dreaming one might lose something for which nothing gained could compensate.