and came again, with scarcely any interval
between each team as it seemed to those who were dozing, and with a gap
of a whole night between every one as it seemed to those who were broad
awake. At length they began to jolt and rumble over horribly uneven
stones, and Mr Pecksniff looking out of window said it was to-morrow
morning, and they were there.

Very soon afterwards the coach stopped at the office in the city; and
the street in which it was situated was already in a bustle, that fully
bore out Mr Pecksniff's words about its being morning, though for any
signs of day yet appearing in the sky it might have been midnight. There
was a dense fog too; as if it were a city in the clouds, which they had
been travelling to all night up a magic beanstalk; and there was a thick
crust upon the pavement like oilcake; which, one of the outsides (mad,
no doubt) said to another (his keeper, of course), was Snow.

Taking a confused leave of Anthony and his son, and leaving the luggage
of himself and daughters at the office to be called for afterwards, Mr
Pecksniff, with one of the young ladies under each arm, dived across the
street, and then across other streets, and so up the queerest courts,
and down the strangest alleys and under the blindest archways, in a kind
of frenzy; now skipping over a kennel, now running for his life from a
coach and horses; now thinking he had lost his way, now thinking he had
found it; now in a state of the highest confidence, now despondent to
the last degree, but always in a great perspiration and flurry; until at
length they stopped in a kind of paved yard near the Monument. That is
to say, Mr Pecksniff told them so; for as to anything they could see
of the Monument, or anything else but the buildings close at hand, they
might as well have been playing blindman's buff at Salisbury.

Mr Pecksniff looked about him for a moment, and then knocked at the
door of a very dingy edifice, even among the choice collection of dingy
edifices at hand; on the front of which was a little oval board like
a tea-tray, with this inscription--'Commercial Boarding-House: M.
Todgers.'

It seemed that M. Todgers was not up yet, for Mr Pecksniff knocked twice
and rang thrice, without making any impression on anything but a dog
over the way. At last a chain and some bolts were withdrawn with a rusty
noise, as if the weather had made the very fastenings hoarse, and a
small boy with a large red head, and no nose to speak