been paying, and finally the
proprietor went bankrupt and was sold out. The place was shut up for
several months before the shop was let to a firm of dealers in fancy
articles, and the other part was transformed into flats.

Rushton had the contract for the work. When the men went there to 'do
it up' they found the interior of the house in a state of indescribable
filth: the ceilings discoloured with smoke and hung with cobwebs, the
wallpapers smeared and black with grease, the handrails and the newel
posts of the staircase were clammy with filth, and the edges of the
doors near the handles were blackened with greasy dirt and
finger-marks. The tops of the skirtings, the mouldings of the doors,
the sashes of the windows and the corners of the floors were thick with
the accumulated dust of years.

In one of the upper rooms which had evidently been used as a nursery or
playroom for the children of the renowned chef, the wallpaper for about
two feet above the skirting was blackened with grease and ornamented
with childish drawings made with burnt sticks and blacklead pencils,
the door being covered with similar artistic efforts, to say nothing of
some rude attempts at carving, evidently executed with an axe or a
hammer. But all this filth was nothing compared with the unspeakable
condition of the kitchen and scullery, a detailed description of which
would cause the blood of the reader to curdle, and each particular hair
of his head to stand on end.

Let it suffice to say that the walls, the ceiling, the floor, the
paintwork, the gas-stove, the kitchen range, the dresser and everything
else were uniformly absolutely and literally--black. And the black was
composed of soot and grease.

In front of the window there was a fixture--a kind of bench or table,
deeply scored with marks of knives like a butcher's block. The sill of
the window was about six inches lower than the top of the table, so
that between the glass of the lower sash of the window, which had
evidently never been raised, and the back of the table, there was a
long narrow cavity or trough, about six inches deep, four inches wide
and as long as the width of the window, the sill forming the bottom of
the cavity.

This trough was filled with all manner of abominations: fragments of
fat and decomposed meat, legs of rabbits and fowls, vegetable matter,
broken knives and forks, and hair: and the glass of the window was
caked with filth of the same descriptio