To return to Craven Hill.  A row of very fine elm trees was separated only by the carriage-road from the houses, whose front windows looked through their branches upon a large, quiet, green meadow, and beyond that to an extensive nursery garden of enchanting memory, where our weekly allowances were expended in pots of violets and flower-seeds and roots of future fragrance, for our small gardens:  this pleasant foreground divided us from the Bayswater Road and Kensington Gardens.  At the back of the houses and their grounds stretched a complete open of meadow land, with hedgerows and elm trees, and hardly any building in sight in any direction.  Certainly this was better than the smoke and din of London.  To my father, however, the distance was a heavy increase of his almost nightly labor at the theatre.  Omnibuses were no part of London existence then; a hackney coach (there were no cabs, either four-wheelers or hansoms) was a luxury to be thought of only occasionally, and for part of the way; and so he generally wound up his hard evening’s work with a five miles’ walk from Covent Garden to Craven Hill.

It was perhaps the inconvenience of this process that led to our taking, in addition to our “rural” residence, a lodging in Gerard Street, Soho.  The house immediately fronts Anne Street, and is now a large establishment for the sale of lamps.  It was a handsome old house, and at one time belonged to the “wicked” Lord Lyttleton.  At the time I speak of, we occupied only a part of it, the rest remaining in the possession of the proprietor, who was a picture-dealer, and his collection of dusky chefs-d’oeuvre covered the walls of the passages and staircases with dark canvas, over whose varnished surface ill-defined figures and ill-discerned faces seemed to flit, as with some trepidation I ran past them.  The house must have been a curious as well as a very large one; but I never saw more of it than our own apartments, which had some peculiarities that I remember.  Our dining-room was a very large, lofty, ground-floor room, fitted up partially as a library with my father’s books, and having at the farther end, opposite the windows, two heavy, fluted pillars, which gave it rather a dignified appearance.  My mother’s drawing-room, which was on the first floor and at the back of the house, was oval in shape and lighted only by a skylight; and one entrance to it was through a small anteroom or boudoir, with looking-glass doors and ceiling all incrusted with scrolls and foliage and rococo Louis Quinze style of ornamentation, either in plaster or carved in wood and painted white.  There were back staircases and back doors without number, leading in all directions to unknown regions; and the whole house, with its remains of magnificence and curious lumber of objects of art and vertu, was a very appropriate frame for the traditional ill-repute of its former noble owner.