the 'undertaker' all at once returned to its normal
proportions."

This stratagem of Cleave's was rivalled a few years ago by M. Herzen's
clever plan of sending great numbers of his treasonable and forbidden
paper, the _Kolokol_, to Russia, soldered up in sardine-boxes. No
Government, in fact, can ever baffle determined and ingenious smugglers.

One especially sad association attaches to Shoe Lane, and that is the
burial in the workhouse graveyard (the site of the late Farringdon
Market) of that unhappy child of genius, Chatterton the poet. In August,
1770, the poor lad, who had come from Bristol full of hope and ambition
to make his fortune in London by his pen, broken-hearted and maddened by
disappointment, destroyed himself in his mean garret-lodging in Brooke
Street, Holborn, by swallowing arsenic. Mr. John Dix, his very
unscrupulous biographer, has noted down a curious legend about the
possible removal of the poet's corpse from London to Bristol, which,
doubtful as it is, is at least interesting as a possibility:--

"I found," says Mr. Dix, "that Mrs. Stockwell, of Peter Street, wife of
Mr. Stockwell, a basket-maker, was the person who had communicated to
Sir R. Wilmot her grounds for believing Chatterton to have been so
interred; and on my requesting her to repeat to me what she knew of that
affair, she commenced by informing me that at ten years of age she was a
scholar of Mrs. Chatterton, his mother, where she was taught plain work,
and remained with her until she was near twenty years of age; that she
slept with her, and found her kind and motherly, insomuch that there
were many things which in moments of affliction Mrs. C. communicated to
her, that she would not have wished to have been generally known; and
among others, she often repeated how happy she was that her unfortunate
son lay buried in Redcliff, through the kind attention of a friend or
relation in London, who, after the body had been cased in a parish
shell, had it properly secured and sent to her by the waggon; that when
it arrived it was opened, and the corpse found to be black and half
putrid (having been burst with the motion of the carriage, or from some
other cause), so that it became necessary to inter it speedily; and that
it was early interred by Phillips, the sexton, who was of her family.
That the effect of the loss of her son was a nervous disorder, which
never quitted her, and she was often seen weeping at the bitter
remembrance of he