mn, stale bread, with an oleaginous
superficial surface, applied by a skilled hand, spreading over broader
surfaces than scarcely would have seemed credible; so that regular
customers, when they wanted to have their joke, would pick up a a slice,
and turn it about, and hold it up to the light and put a penny in their
right eye, making believe they had got an eye-glass there, and say,
"Look here, guv'nor! which side is it? I'm only a arskin' fear it
should fall on my Sunday go-to-meeting suit, and grease it."

Rashers of quite unbelievable rancidness, and "nice eggs," in boiling
which poultry, in its early promise, was not unfrequently made an
untimely end of, were the chief articles of consumption. The newspapers
and periodicals--which, somehow, always appeared to be a week old--were
marked by innumerable rings, where the customers had stood their
coffee-cups upon them, and there were thousands of brisk and lively
flies forever buzzing round about the customers' heads and settling on
their noses; and thousands more of sleepy flies, stationary on the walls
and ceiling, and thickly studding the show rasher in the window; and
thousands and thousands more dead flies, lying about everywhere, and
turning up as little surprises in the milk jug and the coffee-grounds,
on the butter, or under the bacon, when you turned it over.

Not in the eggs, by-the-bye. You were pretty safe from them there--the
embryo chick was the worst thing that could happen to you.

Not altogether a nice kind of place to pass one's evenings in, you are
thinking. Well, no; but it was uncommonly quiet and snug, and
uncommonly cheap, which was rather a point with me. I was, in truth, so
hard up that night that I had stood outside the window a good twenty
minutes, balancing my last coin--a fourpenny-bit--in my hand, and
tossing up, mentally, to decide whether I should spend it in a bed or a
supper. I decided on the latter, and entered the coffee-house, where I
hoped, after I had eaten, to be able to sleep away an hour or two in
peace, if I could get a snug corner to myself.

Several other people, however, seemed to have gone there with something
of the same idea, and snored up and down, with their heads comfortably
pillowed among the dirty plates and tea-things, while others carried on
low, muttered conversations, and one woman was telling an interminable
tale, breaking off now and then to whimper.

There was one empty box, in a darkish corner, and