The side-door for "jugs and bottles" gave on to a dirty and odoriferous mews, down which my destination lay. The unbridled enthusiasm of eighteen years can do much to harden or deaden the nervous system, but certainly it required all my fortitude to withstand the sickening combination of beer and damp horsy hay which greeted my nostrils. Neither could the cabmen and stablemen, hanging round the public-house doors and the mews generally, be calculated to increase one's democratic aspirations, but I walked resolutely on, and turning to my left, dexterously avoiding an unsavoury heap of horse manure, straw, and other offal, I clambered up a break-neck ladder, at the top of which loomed the office of the _Bomb_. The door was furtively opened in response to my kick by a lean, hungry-looking little man of very circumspect appearance. He cast me a surly and suspicious glance, accompanied by a not very encouraging snarl, but on my mentioning Dr. Armitage he opened the door a few inches wider and I passed in. It took me some seconds before I could accustom my eyes to the fetid atmosphere of this den, which was laden with the smoke of divers specimens of the worst shag and cheapest tobacco in the metropolis. But various objects, human and inanimate, became gradually more distinct, and I found myself in a long, ill-lighted wooden shed, where type and dust and unwashed human beings had left their mark, and where soap and sanitation were unknown. Past the type racks and cases, which occupied the first half of this apartment, were grouped benches, stools, packing-cases, and a few maimed and deformed chairs for the accommodation of the assembly. Then came a hand printing-press, on which were spread the remains of some comrade's repast: the vertebral column of a bloater and an empty condensed-milk can, among other relics. The floor, from one extremity to the other of the "office," was littered with heaps of unsold revolutionary literature, the approximate date of which could be gauged by the thickness of dust in which it was smothered. On the walls and from beams and rafters hung foils and boxing-gloves; artistic posters and cartoons, the relics of a great artist who had founded the _Bomb_, and the effigies of divers comrades to whom a pathway to a better world had been opened through the hangman's drop. But what most riveted my attention was an indistinct animate _something_ enveloped in a red flag, rolled up in a heap on the frouziest and most forbidding old sofa it had ever been my lot to behold. That this _something_ was animate could be gathered from the occasional twitchings of the red bundle, and from the dark mop of black greasy hair which emerged from one end. But to what section of the animal kingdom _it_ belonged I was quite at a loss to decide. Other stray objects which I noted about this apartment were an ostentatious-looking old revolver of obsolete make, and some chemical bottles, which, however, contained no substance more dangerous than