In the middle of Newman Street stands a paintless door, in the centre of which gleams a brass-plate, bearing the word "Scadgers," in fat Roman capitals. Nothing else. No "Mr.;" no description of Scadgers' profession; nothing to break the charm. "Scadgers" stands an oasis of shining brass in a desert of lustreless deal, and winks knowingly at the double-faced portrait, one half dirty, the other half clean, at the picture-restorer's over the way. Scadgers' door differed from its fellows in having but one bell-handle; for Scadgers had quite enough business to occupy the whole house, and to demand ramifications in the neighbourhood. All we have to do, in the course of this story, is to deal with Scadgers as Scadgers; but my private belief is that Scadgers was the Universal Philanthropic Man's a Man for a' that Loan Office, held at the Blue Pig and Toothache in Wells Street; that he was "Cash promptly advanced on furniture without removal, freehold and leasehold property, legacies, reversions, warrants, and all other securities. Sheriffs' executions and rent-distraint immediately paid out" (_vide_ advertisement);--that he was "Methuselah's Muffin-Powder, or Never say Die" patent medicine, and proprietor-in-chief of "The Hob," a domestic Miscellany, which commenced with weak romance, and failed, but has since achieved an enormous success for itself, and a fortune for its spirited proprietor, by the publication of "Baby Clarence; or, My Life at Brompton." Certainly you could not have guessed Scadgers' occupation from the outside of his residence, which looked like a dirty lodging-house, like a third-rate boarding-house, like those melancholy houses occupied by those most melancholy people on earth, third-rate piano-sellers; like a house let in rooms to people who lithograph fashion-plates; like any thing but what it was--a house where more money was made than in nine-tenths of the houses in London.