It was a double house, with long, narrow, heavily-framed windows.

Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds, appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance.
'Nothing changed,' said the traveller, stopping to look round.

'Dark and miserable as ever.

A light in my mother's window, which seems never to have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and dragged my box over this pavement.

Well, well, well!' He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work of festooned jack-towels and children's heads with water on the brain, designed after a once-popular monumental pattern, and knocked.