Irreverent street noises fainted dead away on the threshold of the ornamental gates, at the sight of the hermit lodge-keeper.

The cry of the costermonger and the screech of the vagabond London boy were banished out of hearing.

Even the regular tradesman's time-honored business noises at customers' doors, seemed as if they ought to have been relinquished here.

The frantic falsetto of the milkman, the crash of the furious butcher's cart over the never-to-be pulverized stones of the new road through the "park," always sounded profanely to the passing stranger, in the spick-and-span stillness of this Paradise of the large incomes.
The hapless small incomes had the very worst end of the whole locality entirely to themselves, and absorbed all the noises and nuisances, just as the large incomes absorbed all the tranquillities and luxuries of suburban existence.

Here were the dreary limits at which architectural invention stopped in despair.