st as many plates or bell-handles as there are apartments
within. The windows are, for the same reason, sufficiently diversified
in appearance, being ornamented with every variety of common blind and
curtain that can easily be imagined; while every doorway is blocked up,
and rendered nearly impassable, by a motley collection of children and
porter pots of all sizes, from the baby in arms and the half-pint pot,
to the full-grown girl and half-gallon can.

In the parlour of one of these houses, which was perhaps a thought
dirtier than any of its neighbours; which exhibited more bell-handles,
children, and porter pots, and caught in all its freshness the first
gust of the thick black smoke that poured forth, night and day, from a
large brewery hard by; hung a bill, announcing that there was yet one
room to let within its walls, though on what story the vacant room could
be--regard being had to the outward tokens of many lodgers which the
whole front displayed, from the mangle in the kitchen window to the
flower-pots on the parapet--it would have been beyond the power of a
calculating boy to discover.

The common stairs of this mansion were bare and carpetless; but a
curious visitor who had to climb his way to the top, might have observed
that there were not wanting indications of the progressive poverty
of the inmates, although their rooms were shut. Thus, the first-floor
lodgers, being flush of furniture, kept an old mahogany table--real
mahogany--on the landing-place outside, which was only taken in, when
occasion required. On the second story, the spare furniture dwindled
down to a couple of old deal chairs, of which one, belonging to the
back-room, was shorn of a leg, and bottomless. The story above,
boasted no greater excess than a worm-eaten wash-tub; and the garret
landing-place displayed no costlier articles than two crippled pitchers,
and some broken blacking-bottles.

It was on this garret landing-place that a hard-featured square-faced
man, elderly and shabby, stopped to unlock the door of the front attic,
into which, having surmounted the task of turning the rusty key in its
still more rusty wards, he walked with the air of legal owner.

This person wore a wig of short, coarse, red hair, which he took off
with his hat, and hung upon a nail. Having adopted in its place a dirty
cotton nightcap, and groped about in the dark till he found a remnant of
candle, he knocked at the partition which divided the two gar