By Celia's Arbour - 1893 Author:Walter Besant Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: instinct of experience, because he felt, in spite of the rags, that the boy had been dressed by a sailor's wife. None but such a woman could give a sea-goi... more »ng air to two garments so simple as those which kept the weather from the boy. He led the child by the hand till presently the child led him, and piloted the Captain safely to a house where a woman—it was Mrs. Jeram—came running out, crying shrilly: "Lenny! why, wherever have you bin and got to?" There was another ragged little boy with a round back, five or six years old, sitting on the door-step. When the Captain had finished his talk with Mrs. Jeram, he came out and noticed that other boy, and then he returned and had more talk. CHAPTER III. VICTORY ROW. Mrs. Jeram was a weekly tenant in one of a row of small four-roomed houses known as Victory Row, which led out of Nelson Street, and was a broad blind court, bounded on one side and at the end by the Dockyard wall. It was not a dirty and confined court, but quite the reverse, being large, clean, and a very Cathedral close for quietness. The wall, built of a warm red brick, had a broad and sloping top, on which grew wallflowers, long grasses, and stonecrop; overhanging the wall was a row of great elms, in the branches of which there was a rookery, so that all day long you could listen, if you wished, to the talk of the rooks. Now, this is never querulous, angry, or argumentative.The rook does not combat an adversary's opinion: he merely states his own; if the other one does not agree with him he states it again, but without temper. If you watch them and listen, you will come to the conclusion that they are not theorists, like poor humans, but simply investigators of fact. It has a restful sound, the talk of rooks; you listen in th...« less