, 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 garrets, and inquired, in a
