Buried Alive : A Tale of These Days

The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of the ecliptic--that angle whichis chiefly responsible for our geography and therefore for our history--had causedthe phenomenon known in London as summer.

The whizzing globe happened tohave turned its most civilized face away from the sun, thus producing night inSelwood Terrace, South Kensington.

In No. 91 Selwood Terrace two lights, on theground-floor and on the first-floor, were silently proving that man's ingenuity canoutwit nature's.

No. 91 was one of about ten thousand similar houses betweenSouth Kensington Station and North End Road.

With its grimy stucco front, itscellar kitchen, its hundred stairs and steps, its perfect inconvenience, and itsconscience heavy with the doing to death of sundry general servants, it uplifted tinchimney-cowls to heaven and gloomily awaited the day of judgment for Londonhouses, sublimely ignoring the axial and orbital velocities of the earth and even thereckless flight of the whole solar system through space.

You felt that No. 91 wasunhappy, and that it could only be rendered happy by a 'To let' standard in its frontpatch and a 'No bottles' card in its cellar-windows.

It possessed neither of thesespecifics. Though of late generally empty, it was never untenanted.

In the entirecourse of its genteel and commodious career it had never once been to let.