CHAP, iv.] ESCAPE PREVENTED.

Green Arbour Court. He found it a small square of
tall and miserable houses, the very intestines of which
seemed turned inside out, to judge from the old garments
and frippery that fluttered from every window. " It
" appeared," he says, in his Tales of a Traveller, " to be a
" region of washerwomen, and lines were stretched about
" the little square, on which clothes were dangling to dry."
The disputed right to a wash-tub was going on when he
entered; heads in inob-caps were protruded from, every
window; and the loud clatter of vulgar tongues was assisted
by the shrill pipes of swarming children, nestled and
cradled in every procreant chamber of the hive. The whole
scene, in short, was one of whose unchanged resemblance
to the scenes of former days I have since found curious
corroboration, in a magazine engraving of the place nigh
half a century old. * Here were the tall faded houses, with
heads out of window at every story; the dirty neglected
children; the bawling slipshod women; in one corner,
clothes hanging to dry, and in another the cure of smoky
chimneys announced. Without question, the same squalid,
squalling colony, which it then was, it had been in
Goldsmith's time. He would compromise with the children
for occasional cessation of their noise, by occasional cakes or
sweetmeats, or by a tune upon his flute, for which all the
court assembled ; he would talk pleasantly with the poorest
of his neighbours, and was long recollected to have greatly
enjoyed the -talk of a working watchmaker in the court;
every night, he would risk his neck at those steep stone
stairs; f every day, for his clothes had become too ragged to

* See the frontispiece to yol. xliii of the European Magazine.
•j* Ward, in his London Spy, talks of '' returning down stairs with as ranch
'' care and caution of tumMing head-foremost, as he that goes down Gtreen Arbour
" Court steps in. the middle of winter."

M2f. "Alas, sir," cried