ing asked to dine at
Todgers's, had travelled round and round for a weary time, with its very
chimney-pots in view; and finding it, at last, impossible of attainment,
had gone home again with a gentle melancholy on their spirits,
tranquil and uncomplaining. Nobody had ever found Todgers's on a verbal
direction, though given within a few minutes' walk of it. Cautious
emigrants from Scotland or the North of England had been known to reach
it safely, by impressing a charity-boy, town-bred, and bringing him
along with them; or by clinging tenaciously to the postman; but these
were rare exceptions, and only went to prove the rule that Todgers's was
in a labyrinth, whereof the mystery was known but to a chosen few.

Several fruit-brokers had their marts near Todgers's; and one of the
first impressions wrought upon the stranger's senses was of oranges--of
damaged oranges--with blue and green bruises on them, festering in
boxes, or mouldering away in cellars. All day long, a stream of porters
from the wharves beside the river, each bearing on his back a bursting
chest of oranges, poured slowly through the narrow passages; while
underneath the archway by the public-house, the knots of those who
rested and regaled within, were piled from morning until night. Strange
solitary pumps were found near Todgers's hiding themselves for the most
part in blind alleys, and keeping company with fire-ladders. There were
churches also by dozens, with many a ghostly little churchyard, all
overgrown with such straggling vegetation as springs up spontaneously
from damp, and graves, and rubbish. In some of these dingy
resting-places which bore much the same analogy to green churchyards,
as the pots of earth for mignonette and wall-flower in the windows
overlooking them did to rustic gardens, there were trees; tall trees;
still putting forth their leaves in each succeeding year, with such a
languishing remembrance of their kind (so one might fancy, looking on
their sickly boughs) as birds in cages have of theirs. Here, paralysed
old watchmen guarded the bodies of the dead at night, year after year,
until at last they joined that solemn brotherhood; and, saving that they
slept below the ground a sounder sleep than even they had ever known
above it, and were shut up in another kind of box, their condition can
hardly be said to have undergone any material change when they, in turn,
were watched themselves.

Among the narrow thoroughfares at hand, the