Beyond the postman, the tax-collectors, and
those miracles of topographical erudition who
deliver County Court summonses, and serve
notices for the Insolvent Court, I doubt if
they are a hundred in London,
exclusive of the inhabitants themselves, who
know anything about Tattyboys Rents, or
even whereabouts they are. It is believed
that the names of the magnates of the Rents
are inscribed in that golden book of commerce,
the Post-office London Directory, but the
place itself finds no mention there. By
internal evidence and much collation of the
work in question, it is surmised that Tattyboys
Rents is not even the proper name of
the score of houses so called, and that it is
legally known—no not known, for it isn't
known—but that it should be designated as—
Little Blitsom Street. Plugg, of the water-
rates, says that in his youth he well remembers
a small stone tablet on the corner wall
of number nineteen, running thus, "Little
Blitsom Street, 1770,"—and old Mrs. Brush,
the charwoman, who, in the days of King
James the First, would infallibly have been
burnt for a witch, but is now venerated
as the oldest inhabitant, minds the time
"when a ferocious band of miscreants,"
whether forgers, burglars, or murderers,
is not stated, were captured in Tattyboys
Rents by that bold runner, Townshend,
and his red-waistcoated acotholites, and
by him conveyed before Sir Richard Birnie:
the wretches being known as the " Little
Blitsom Street Gang.'' Mogg's Map of the
Metropolis, with the later charts of Richard
and Davis, passes the Rents by, in contemptuous
silence. Blitsom Street and long, dirty
Turk's Lane, into which it leads, are both set
down in fair characters, but beyond a nameless
little space between two blocks of houses,
there is nothing to tell you where Tattyboys
Rents may be. It is no good asking the
policeman anything about them. I have my
doubts even whether he knows; but even
granting his sapience, I have my suspicions
that unless he knew your position and
character well, he would affect entire ignorance
on the subject. He has his private reasons
for doing so. Tattyboys Rents are far too
snugly situated, peaceable, and well-behaved,
for its whereabout to be divulged to
strangers—possibly of indifferent character.
Therefore my advice to you is, if you understand
navigation which I do not, to take
observations by the sun and moon, and,
by the help of your " Hamilton Moore,"
chronometers, quadrant, compass steering
due north, and a guinea case of mathematical
instruments, work out Tattyboys Rents'
exact place on the chart,—and then go and
find it. Or, " another way," as the cookery-
book says, follow Turk's Lane, till you come
to Blitsom Street, up which wander till you
stumble, somehow, into Tattyboys Rents.

Which last you are very likely to do
literally, for the only approach to the Rents is
by a flight of steps, very steep and very
treacherous, their vicinity being masked by a
grove of posts, and the half-dozen idlers
you are always sure to find congregrated
round Chapford's beershop. And it
often happened that, of the few strangers
who have travelled in Tattyboys Rents, the
proudest, and sternest: men who would have
scorned to perform the ceremony of the
Kotou in China, and would have scouted the
idea of salaaming to the Great Mogul: have
made their first entrance into the Rents with
the lowliest obeisances, with bended knees
and foreheads touching the pavement.

If Miss Mary Russell Mitford had not
written, years ago, Our Village, it is
decidedly by that name that I should have
called this article. For, Tattyboys Rents are
not only a village as regards their isolation,
and the unsophisticated nature of their
inhabitants, but they resemble those villages,
few and far between, now-a-days, where is no
railway station—cross-country villages, where
the civilising shriek of the engine-whistle is
never heard; where the building mania in
any style of architecture is unfelt; where the
inhabitants keep themselves to themselves,
and have a supreme contempt for the inhabitants
of all other villages, hamlets, townships,
and boroughs whatsoever; where strangers
are barely tolerated and never popular; where
improvements, alterations, and innovations,
are unanimously scouted; where the father's
customs are the son's rule of life, and the
daughters do what their mothers did before
them. The Metropolitan Buildings Act
is a dead letter in Tattyboys Rents, for
nobody ever thinks of building—to say nothing
of rebuilding or painting—a house. The
Common Lodging-House Act goes for
nothing, for there are no common lodging-
houses, and the lodgers, where there are
any, are of an uncommon character. No one
fears the Nuisances Removals Act, for
everybody has his own particular nuisance,
and is too fond of it to move for its removal.
The Health of Towns Act has nothing in
common with the health of Tattyboys Rents,
for fevers don't seem to trouble themselves
to come down its steep entrance steps, and
the cholera has, on three occasions, given
it the cut direct. It is of no use bothering
about the drainage, for nobody
complains about it, and nobody will tell you
whether it is deficient or not. As to the
supply of water, there is a pump at the
further extremity of the Rents that would
satisfy the most exigent hydropathist;
and, touching that pump, I should like to see
the bold stranger female who would dare to
draw a jugful of water from it, or the stranger
boy who would presume to lift to his lips the
time-worn and water-rusted iron ladle
attached by a chain to that pump's nozzle.
Such persons as district surveyors and
inspectors of nuisances have been heard of in
Tattyboys Rents, but they are estimated as