"The name of MR. VHOLES, preceded by the legend GROUND FLOOR, is inscribed upon a doorpost in Symond's Inn, Chancery Lane: a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn, like a large dust-bin of two compartments and a sifter. It looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his day, and constructed his inn of old building materials, which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond's memory with congenial shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond, are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.... Mr. Vholes's office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner, and blinks at a dead wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes's jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning, and encumbered by a black bulkhead of cellarage staircase, against which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr. Vholes's chambers are on so small a scale, that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool; while the other, who elbows him at the same desk, has equal facilities for poking the fire. A smell as of unwholesome sheep, blending with the smell of must and dust, is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles, and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers. The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close. The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot everywhere, and the dull, cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty, and always shut, unless coerced." Indeed, the whole region of the law, in its by-ways, and smaller Inns, is altogether suggestive of _Bleak House_. Dickens, a kind of Sam Weller himself in his knowledge of London, knew all the Inns well, living in several of them. He is a faithful chronicler, with this reservation, that he has no eye for the picturesque interest, but is all eye for the human. Were these places dirtier in Dickens's time? That can hardly be. Why, one reflects, is there a kind of tradition in such things? even as regards the eternal cats and the equally eternal "laundresses"? (called so, presumably, because they never seem to wash!) Why are the window panes, apparently, never, never, cleaned? Has never any one come here with a love of cleanliness for its own sake, or with a yearning for clean windows, to these Inns?