The evening was chilly and the breeze found its way beneath my upturned collar as I crossed the river, following the muddled map a cabbie had drawn for me with a stub of pencil on the back of a playbill. The district was more noisy than where I lived in Bloomsbury, busy with horses and carriages and people walking and children calling to each other as they played hopscotch on the pavements, and the narrow streets and multitude of houses seemed to trap the dingy yellowish fog low down so that everybody who walked through it appeared jaundiced. When I turned the last corner into Dolland Street I slowed my pace so much that I nearly stopped walking altogether, as though a warning hand had caught me by the collar to drag me away from the madness of what I was about to do; but after coming all this way, to turn back when I was already on Archie's street, mere yards away from him, was impossible. The house was easy to pick out from its neighbours, one of only three on the street with shop fronts; 'Joseph Wilkes, Boot & Shoe Repair' was painted on the sign above the window, and I could see more painted signs in the windowpanes and displays of lasts and brushes.
