The house in Solon Street was not an interesting house to live in one bit. It was tall and narrow, jammed in between another tall narrow house on one side, and a green grocer's shop on the other, and one could only see the Acropolis,[5] and Phalerum and the sea if one got up to the terrace on the roof, where they hung out the clothes to dry; and even from there it looked very far off. There was not a scrap of garden, only a small paved courtyard at the back, generally littered with empty cases which had come from abroad with new instruments and new books for the doctor. Pavlo sometimes attempted to play house or shop in the biggest of these, but Marina, the cook, used to get very cross if he brought in damp straw on his shoes over her freshly scrubbed kitchen, and the other maid, Aphrodite, would screw up her ugly brown face, and bring her thick black eyebrows together, and threaten that the next time he got another big tear in his clothes from those great long packing nails for her to mend, if she did not tell his uncle, they need never call her "Aphrodite" again! His uncle heard her once, and said laughingly that they need never have called her "Aphrodite" at all, but Pavlo got his scolding all the same, for causing unnecessary work, so that the packing cases had to be abandoned. In winter it was better. After his preparation for next day's school was over, and before the long delayed supper, he would stay in the little dining room, and lying flat on the floor in the warmth of the big white Viennese stove, he would colour the pictures in the odd numbers of an English illustrated medical journal, which his uncle had given to be thrown away. There were very rarely what Pavlo considered real pictures in them, and he got rather tired of colouring "thoracic aortas" in bright orange, and "abdominal aortas" in pale green, and "tracheæ" in stripes of purple and yellow; but now and then he would come across some funny groups of little insects, and once there was a picture of an operation in a hospital, where there were any amount of doctors and nurses to be coloured, each one differently. That picture lasted him three whole evenings, and would have been even more successful than it was, if only the very best and softest of his chalks, the crimson one, had not somehow got broken inside the wood, so that it all came away in little pieces when he tried to sharpen it, till at last there was nothing left but a little stump of chalk without any wood, and anyone who has tried, knows how hard it is to colour a whole dress with a little bit of chalk that one cannot hold properly.