Into some of these you stepped from the pavement down, as it were, into a cave, the level of the shop being eight or ten inches below the street, while the first floor projected over the pavement quite to the edge of the kerb.

To enter these shops it was necessary to stoop, and when you were inside there was barely room to turn round.

Other shops were, indeed, level with the street; but you had to be careful, because the threshold was not flush with the pavement, but rose a couple of inches and then fell again, a very trap to the toe of the unwary.

Many had no glass at all, but were open, like a butcher's or fishmonger's.

Those that had glass were so restricted for space that, rich as they might be within in the good things of the earth, they could make no 'display.' All the genius of a West-end shopman could not have made an artistic arrangement in that narrow space and in that bad light; for, though so small below, the houses rose high, and the street being so narrow the sunshine rarely penetrated into it.
But mean as a metropolitan shopman might have thought the spot, the business done there was large, and, more than that, it was genuine.