coated, mild-eyed, meek-nosed sheep, but now
the devil's letter-paper, begrimed with hideous
abracadabras of engrossment: "whereases"
and "furthermores," and "as aforesaids," and
the devil only (and his attorneys and
solicitors) know what besides. Know you this
lane?

Slinking out of this ill-omened thoroughfare,
in a shabby, shambling, downcast manner, and
not turning boldly out of it at a respectable
angle, is a little frowsy street with no
thoroughfare at the end thereof, save a maze
of horrible little courts and alleys. This is
Anathema Street, leading to Maranatha
Buildings, Bell Alley, Book Court, and Candle
Row. The grass grows between the uneven
paving stones in the road: no sound of wheels
is ever heard save that of some dismal cab
landing a captive at Mr. Nebuchadnezzar's
spunging-house. Once, as legends tell, a
printer's boy, going with a truck full of
"forms" ready for "machining" towards
Boot Lane, lost himself in the solitudes of
Anathema Street. Amid the shades of evening
his errant vehicle ran with dreadful
concussion against one of the many posts that
hamper, like as pleas or special demurrers do
justice, the ingress to Maranatha Buildings.
The imprisoned types burst their "chases;"
the "blocks" (the publication was an
illustrated one) flew hither and thither, and splat
(imperfect of split) into countless fragments.
The forms fell

    "——with hideous ruin and combustion down
    To bottomless perdition."

They went into irretrievable "pie;" and the
clattering "chases" woke up hoarse,
bronchital echoes in Mr. Nebuchadnezzar's
backyard, and rung shriekingly the iron bars and
stanchions of Mr. Haman's "lock-up," and
shook the yellow rotten window blinds of
Messrs. Faggot, Skewball, and Wrack's
parlours, till the greasy, dusky, worsted tassels
dropped from their frayed cords, and the
mouldy title-deeds and law papers in the
battered japanned cases with half-effaced
initials trembled again. Small bands of juvenile
wreckers came down that night and next
morning to gaze upon the ruined newspaper,
and made savage forays on its scattered
fragments. There was joy in Maranatha Buildings.
Young savages careered about with "chases"
round their necks like quadrangular dogs'
collars, and infants of tender years sucked
leaden lollipops of "bourgeois" and "non-
pareil."

In the maze of courts and alleys I have
cursorily mentioned—somewhere in the
midst of its intricacies, but where I cannot
exactly tell, for I never knew—is the place
of public entertainment known as The File,
Dorothy Casay, landlady. D. C. is a widow.
The deceased Casay was clerk to Messrs.
Caveat and Emptor of Scrivener's Yard. He
came to his end one day in Fleet Street, somehow
between a Hansom cab, an advertising
van, and a somewhat too heavily laden blue
bag. That was before the abolition of the
law of deodand; and Messrs. Caveat and
Emptor managed to screw some pretty pickings
out of the cab proprietor and the van
advertiser; which, together with their own
munificence to the relict of a servant who had
died as it were on the field of battle—writs
in his pocket, and harness (in the shape
of the blue bag) on his back—and the
subscription of friends and admirers, enabled
Mrs. Casay to purchase the goodwill and
stock of The File public-house before-
mentioned.

Let us put an appearance upon The File.
It is a house all corners. The surrounding
houses seem to have made aggressive inroads
upon it, and to have squeezed it out of shape.
Its outer side is beset with snares, pitfalls,
impediments, obstacles—all like Law.
Barbers' poles, dyers' poles, the sign of a rival
public-house hard by, the crane of a hop-
warehouse, project against and about its
walls, as if emblematical of the sticks and
staves of Law. As I have said that I don't
know the exact situation of The File, you
must thread half-a-dozen little lanes and
courts; take care you don't fall into the
subterranean cobbler's stall opposite the eel-pie
shop; then if you leave the heterogeneous
shop on your right—the species of legal
marine store shop, where are sold old writs,
old declarations, old warrants, ink-bottles,
deed-cases, blue-bags—the rusted, battered,
mouldy ruins of the paraphernalia of Law—
the thousand and one twopenny-halfpenny
nicknacks garnered together here from the
field of the Westminster Waterloo—nicknacks
more interesting, more suggestive, and often
more genuine than the rusted eagles,
flattened bullets, and rusted cuirasses, of which
so plentiful a crop grows on the road from
Brussels to Waterloo;—avoid all these traps,
obstacles, and stumbling-blocks, and you will
come upon The File suddenly. It is all
corners inside as well as out. You go up stairs
to the cellar, and tumble down steps to the
bars. There are windows where no windows
should be, and doors everywhere but where
they should properly be. Everything in the
interior reminds you, in its fantastic
shapelessness, of that dreadful octagonal apartment
invented for the ruthless Italian, which
diurnally collapsed, until its hapless inventor
—confined therein by his ungrateful patron—
was crushed to death. Cobwebs flourish in
The File. So do ink-stains; for the profession
of its frequenters renders the frequent
scribbling of memoranda, appointments,
notes of information, addresses of "parties,"
necessary; and the bulgy inkstand (like a
pewter pot cut down), with the "black sea of
thought " thickened to a comfortable degree
of muddiness therein, and the stumpy pens,
with the dirty, fractured wafers—crumbs
from some rich lawyer's table—are in constant
requisition, are passed and repassed across