The storm had long given place to a calm the most profound, and the evening pretty far advanced, when there occurred in the inn another incident more angry still, and reached a state of ferocity which could not have been surpassed, we are told, if there had actually been a Saracen's Head then present in the establishment. Nicholas and John Browdie, following to where the noise came from, discovered coffee-room customers, coachmen and helpers congregating round the prostrate figure of a young man, with another young man standing in defiance over him. The latter was no other than Frank Cheeryble, who, overhearing disrespectful and insolent remarks coming from his opponent in the fray, relative to a young lady, had taken the part of the latter by vigorously setting about the traducer, who was ultimately turned out of the inn. Frank Cheeryble was staying the night in the house, and so the four friends adjourned upstairs together and spent a pleasant half-hour with great satisfaction and mutual entertainment. These are the chief associations the Saracen's Head had in connection with _Nicholas Nickleby_, except that it might be mentioned that Mrs. Nickleby, as she would, confused its sign with that of another notable inn, by referring to it as the "Saracen with two necks." There are, however, two other references to the inn in Dickens's books. In _Our Mutual Friend_, we read that: "Mrs. Wilfer's impressive countenance followed Bella with glaring eyes, presenting a combination of the once popular sign of the Saracen's Head with a piece of Dutch clockwork"; and again, in one of his Uncommercial papers, Dickens, speaking of his wanderings about London and of having left behind him this and that historic spot, says he "had got past the Saracen's Head (with an ignominious rash of posting bills disfiguring his swarthy countenance) and had strolled up the yard of its ancient neighbour," making clear that the old inn was a notable landmark to him. He knew it in the flourishing days of the coaching era and lived to see it demolished in 1868 to allow of the Metropolitan improvements in the neighbourhood. But its name was not to be entirely erased from London's annals, for another inn, although quite an unromantic one, was erected at the lower end of Snow Hill, only to wither in course of time into an unprofitable concern and to give up the ghost as a tavern. In 1912, this building was taken over by a firm of manufacturers of fancy leather goods and kindred articles of commerce, who recast the building for the purpose of their trade and its necessary business offices. The proprietors have retained the old sign of the Saracen's Head and have done much to keep up the association of the name with the most notable and living part of its history--that of its connection with Dickens's story of _Nicholas Nickleby_.