Christopher and Claire and Betty were riotously happy in their new home for some few days, especially as they were so near Kensington Gardens, only a very little way, in fact, from the gate where the Dogs’ Cemetery is.
And then suddenly they began to miss something. What it was they had no idea; but they knew that in some mysterious way, nice as the new house was, in one respect it was not so nice as the old one. Something was lacking.
It was quite by chance that they discovered what it was; for, being sent one morning to Whiteley’s, on their return they entered Westerham Gardens by a new way, and there on a board fixed to the railings of the corner house they read the terrible words:
ORGANS AND STREET CRIES
PROHIBITED.
Then they all knew in an instant what it was that had vaguely been troubling them in their new house. It was a house without music—a house that stood in a neighbourhood where there were no bands, no organs, and no costermongers.
“What a horrid shame!” said Claire. And then they began to talk about the organs and bands that used to come to their old home in Bloomsbury.
“Do you remember the Italian woman in the yellow handkerchief on Thursday mornings during French?” said Christopher.
“Yes,” said Betty, “and the monkey boy with the accordion on Mondays.”
“And the Punch and Judy on Wednesday afternoons,” said Claire.
“And ‘Fresh wallflowers,’ ‘Nice wallflowers!’ at eleven o’clock every day in spring,” said Christopher.