Why Deputy, Inspector Field can't say. He
only knows that the man who takes care of the
beds and lodgers is always called so. Steady,
O Deputy, with the flaring candle in the
blacking bottle, for this is a slushy back-yard,
and the wooden staircase outside the house
creaks and has holes in it.

Again, in these confined intolerable rooms,
burrowed out like the holes of rats or the
nests of insect vermin, but fuller of intolerable
smells, are crowds of sleepers, each on his foul
truckle-bed coiled up beneath a rug. Halloa
here! Come! Let us see you! Shew your face!
Pilot Parker goes from bed to bed and turns
their slumbering heads towards us, as a salesman
might turn sheep. Some wake up with an
execration and a threat.—What! who spoke?
O! If it's the accursed glaring eye that fixes
me, go where I will, I am helpless. Here! I
sit up to be looked at. Is it me you want?—
Not you, lie down again!—and I lie down,
with a woeful growl.

Wherever the turning lane of light becomes
stationary for a moment, some sleeper appears
at the end of it, submits himself to be scrutinized,
and fades away into the darkness.

There should be strange dreams here, Deputy.
They sleep sound enough, says Deputy,
taking the candle out of the blacking bottle,
snuffing it with his fingers, throwing the snuff
into the bottle, and corking it up with the
candle; that's all I know. What is the inscription,
Deputy, on all the discolored sheets?
A precaution against loss of linen. Deputy
turns down the rug of an unoccupied bed and
discloses it. STOP THIEF!

To lie at night, wrapped in the legend of
my slinking life; to take the cry that pursues
me, waking, to my breast in sleep; to have it
staring at me, and clamouring for me, as soon
as consciousness returns; to have it for my
first-foot on New-Year's day, my Valentine,
my Birthday salute, my Christmas greeting,
my parting with the old year. STOP THIEF!

And to know that I must be stopped, come
what will. To know that I am no match for
this individual energy and keenness, or this
organised and steady system! Come across
the street, here, and, entering by a little
shop, and yard, examine these intricate
passages and doors contrived for escape,
flapping and counter-flapping, like the lids of
the conjuror's boxes. But what avail they?
Who gets in by a nod, and shews their secret
working to us? Inspector Field.

Don't forget the old Farm House, Parker!
Parker is not the man to forget it. We are
going there, now. It is the old Manor-House
of these parts, and stood in the country once.
Then, perhaps, there was something, which
was not the beastly street, to see from the
shattered low fronts of the overhanging
wooden houses we are passing under—shut
up now, pasted over with bills about the literature
and drama of the Mint, and mouldering
away. This long paved yard was a paddock
or a garden once, or a court in front of the
Farm House. Perchance, with a dovecot in
the centre, and fowls pecking about—with fair
elm trees, then, where discolored chimney-stacks
and gables are now—noisy, then, with
rooks which have yielded to a different sort
of rookery. It's likelier than not, Inspector
Field thinks, as we turn into the common
kitchen, which is in the yard, and many paces
from the house.

Well my lads and lasses, how are you all!
Where's Blackey, who has stood near London
Bridge these five-and-twenty years, with a
painted skin to represent disease?—Here he
is, Mr. Field!—How are you, Blackey?—
Jolly, sa!—Not playing the fiddle to-night,
Blackey? Not a night, sa!—A sharp, smiling
youth, the wit of the kitchen, interposes.
He an't musical to-night, sir. I've been
giving him a moral lecture; I've been a
talking to him about his latter end, you see.
A good many of these are my pupils, sir.
This here young man (smoothing down the
hair of one near him, reading a Sunday paper)
is a pupil of mine. I'm a teaching of him to
read, sir. He's a promising cove, sir. He's
a smith, he is, and gets his living by the
sweat of the brow, sir. So do I, myself, sir.
This young woman is my sister, Mr. Field.
She's a getting on very well too. I've a deal
of trouble with 'em, sir, but I 'm richly rewarded,
now I see 'em all a doing so well, and
growing up so creditable. That's a great
comfort, that is, an't it, sir?—In the midst of
the kitchen (the whole kitchen is in ecstacies
with this impromptu "chaff") sits a young,
modest, gentle-looking creature, with a beautiful
child in her lap. She seems to belong
to the company, but is so strangely unlike
it. She has such a pretty, quiet face and
voice, and is so proud to hear the child
admired—thinks you would hardly believe
that he is only nine months old! Is she as
bad as the rest, I wonder? Inspectorial experience
does not engender a belief contrariwise,
but prompts the answer, Not a
ha'porth of difference!

There is a piano going in the old Farm
House as we approach. It stops. Landlady
appears. Has no objections, Mr. Field, to
gentlemen being brought, but wishes it were
at earlier hours, the lodgers complaining of
ill-convenience. Inspector Field is polite and
soothing—knows his woman and the sex.
Deputy (a girl in this case) shows the way
up a heavy broad old staircase, kept very
clean, into clean rooms where many sleepers
are, and where painted panels of an older
time look strangely on the truckle beds. The
sight of white-wash and the smell of soap—
two things we seem by this time to have
parted from in infancy—make the old Farm
House a phenomenon, and connect themselves
with the so curiously misplaced picture of the
pretty mother and child long after we have
left it,—long after we have left, besides, the
neighbouring nook with something of a rustic
flavor in it yet, where once, beneath a low