olves about Lincoln's Inn. The whole neighborhood has an
air of mystery and a scent like a stationer's shop. Always I found Mr.
Guppy there, with a necktie much too smart for the rest of his clothes,
and a bundle of documents tied with red tape. Jobling and young Smallweed
sometimes stopt to talk with him. The doors of the crowded court-rooms
opened now and then, and gentlemen in gowns and horsehair wigs came out to
speak with clients who waited under the arches....

The climax of "Bleak House" is the pursuit of Lady Dedlock, and the
finding of the fugitive, cold and dead, with one arm around a rail of the
dark little graveyard where they buried the law-copyist, "Nemo," and where
poor Jo, the crossing-sweeper, came at night and swept the stones as his
last tribute to the friend who "was very good" to him. There are three
striking descriptions of this place in the novel. "A hemmed-in churchyard,
pestiferous and obscene--a beastly scrap of ground which a Turk would
reject as a savage abomination, and a Kafir would shudder at. With houses
looking on, on every side, save where a reeking little tunnel of a court
gives access to the iron gate--with every villainy of life in action close
on death, and every poisonous element of death in action close on life;
here they lower our dear brother down a foot or two; here sow him in
corruption to be raised in corruption; an avenging ghost at many a
sick-bedside; a shameful testimony to future ages how civilization and
barbarism walked this boastful island together."

The exact situation of the graveyard is not defined in the novel; but it
was evidently near Lincoln's Inn, and Mr. Winter told us, in one of his
delightful London letters, that it was also near Drury Lane. So strangely
hidden away is it among close and dirty houses that it was only after
three long searches through all the courts thereabouts that I found the
"reeking little tunnel," and twice I passed the entrance without observing
it. Opening out of Drury Lane, at the back and side of the theater, is a
network of narrow, flagged passages built up with tall houses. There are
rag and waste-paper shops in this retreat, two or three dreadful little
greengrocers' stalls, a pawnbroker's, a surprizing number of cobblers, and
in the core of the place, where the alley widens into the semblance of a
dwarfed court, a nest of dealers in theatrical finery, dancing-shoes,
pasteboard rounds of beef and cutlets, stage armor, and second-