Ashton-Kirk sighed humorously.

“Perhaps,” said he.  “At any rate the select crimes are usually the conceptions of men who have no idea of putting them into execution.  And that, upon consideration, is a fortunate thing for society.  But, at the same time, it is most irritating to a man of a speculative turn of mind.  Fiction teems with most splendid murders.  Captain Marryat, in Snarleyow, created an almost perfect horror in the attempted slaughter of the boy Smallbones by the hag mother of Vanslyperken; the lad’s reversal of the situation and his plunging a bayonet into the wrinkled throat, makes the chapter an accomplishment difficult to displace.  Remember it?”

Pendleton arose and opened one of the windows.

“Even the noise and smell of this street of yours are grateful after what I have been listening to,” said he.  Then, after a moment spent in examining the adjacent outdoors, he added in a tone of wonderment.  “I say, Kirk, this is really a hole of a place to live!  Why don’t you move?”

The other arose and joined him at the window.  Old-fashioned streets alter wonderfully after the generations of the elect have passed; but when Eastern Europe takes to dumping its furtive hordes into one, the change is marked indeed.  In this one peddler’s wagons replaced the shining carriages of a former day—­wagons drawn by large-jointed horses and driven by bearded men who cried their wares in strange, throaty voices.

Everything exhaled a thick, semi-oriental smell.  Dully painted fire-escapes clung hideously to the fronts of the buildings; stagnant-looking men, wearing their hats, leaned from bedroom windows.  The once decent hallways were smutted with grimy hands; the wide marble steps were huddled with alien, unclean people.

A splendidly spired church stood almost shoulder to shoulder with the Ashton-Kirk house.  Once it had been a place of dignified Episcopal worship; but years of neglect had made it unwholesome and cavern-like; and finally it was given over to a tribe of stolid Lithuanians who stuck a cheaply gilded Greek cross over the door and thronged the street with their wedding and christening processions.

“Perhaps,” said Ashton-Kirk, after a moment’s study of the prospect, “yes, perhaps it is a hole of a place in which to live.  But you see we’ve had this house since shortly after the Revolution; four generations have been born here.  As I have no fashionable wife and I live alone, I am content to stay.  Then, the house suits me; everything is arranged to my taste.  The environment may not be the most desirable; but, my visitors are seldom of the sort that object to externals.”

“Well, you have one just now who is not what you might call partial to such neighborhoods,” said Pendleton.  “And,” looking at his watch, “you will shortly have another who will be, perhaps, still less favorably impressed.”

“Ah!” said Ashton-Kirk.