When Pip received that note one evening on reaching the gateway of the Temple, warning him not to go home, he hired a chariot and drove to Hummum's, Covent Garden. He spent a very miserable night there. In those times, he tells us, "a bed was always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain, letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a despotic monster of a four-post bed in it, straddling over the whole place, putting one of its arbitrary legs into the fire-place, and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner." He goes on to wail of his doleful night. The room smelt of cold soot and hot dust, the tester was covered in blue-bottle flies, which he thought must be lying up for next summer. "When I had lain awake a little while, those extraordinary voices, with which silence teems, began to make themselves audible. The closet whispered, the fire-place sighed, the little washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the chest of drawers." He then thought of the unknown gentleman who once came to Hummum's in the night and had gone to bed and destroyed himself and had been found in the morning weltering in his blood. Altogether a dismal, doleful and miserable experience of Hummum's. But no doubt Pip's liver or nerves were the cause of it, not the hotel. Another reference to it is made in _Sketches by Boz_ in the chapter describing the streets in the morning. Speaking of the pandemonium which reigns in Covent Garden at an early hour after daybreak, the talking, shouting, horses neighing, donkeys braying, Dickens says "these and a hundred other sounds form a compound discordant enough to a Londoner's ears, and remarkably disagreeable to those of country gentlemen who are sleeping at Hummum's for the first time." There is an hotel standing in Covent Garden with the same name to-day, but, although it is on the same spot, it is not the Hummum's of which Pip speaks. That was demolished long ago, and was the scene of a marvellous ghost story told in Boswell's Johnson concerning Parson Ford. The Ship at Gravesend, mentioned as the waterside inn where Pip and his assistants managed to row the convict Magwitch, with the idea of smuggling him out of the country, is known as the Ship and Lobster. [Illustration: THE SHIP AND LOBSTER, GRAVESEND _Drawn by C. G. Harper_]