Like Lower Series-place, Bennett's-rents was famous for its prolific inhabitants. Long as daylight lasted, there was a dense small population of half-dressed aborigines, hooting, racing about, playing, and quarrelling, aided in their efforts by levies from others of the rags of Lincoln's-inn. Why called Bennett's-rents was not obvious, though it might have been from the hideous cracks and seams in the frowzy old houses, whose windows looked as if they had been in a brown-paper-and-rag war, in which glass had suffered a terrible defeat, and submitted now, with an ill grace, to the presence of the new settlers. But the children did not have the channel all up themselves, for at early dawn the pigeons from the housetops paid it visits, and, in spite of broken, dissipated-looking chimney-pots, falling-out mortar, and shattered, soot-covered tiles, there were many soft-eyed, iridescent-- hued birds dwelling upon the roofs of the houses in Bennett's-rents; and, more especially upon Sunday mornings, an observer from some high edifice might have seen dirty-faced men, in hairy caps, rising out of trap-doors in roofs, like "Mr F's aunt" through the factory-floor, and, when half-way out, and forming prominent objects among little wildernesses of sooty, lath-made cages and traps, amusing themselves by waving red-cotton handkerchiefs tied to the end of sticks, for the purpose of keeping their flights of pigeons high in air. A rumour had spread through the court that something was to be seen in the neighbouring street, when out trooped the children from the narrow entrance, and comparative silence reigned, till place and echoes were alike mocked by a man with his cry of "Rag--bone!" but his was labour in vain: he took nothing further from the Rents to glut the shop of Mrs Slagg, and, reaching the end of the place, he departed with his bag still light, and the court knew him no more that day, though there were rags enough in every house to have filled his sack again and again, and drawn down the index of his portable weighing-machine to the furthest limit. Still there was another sound to be heard, for Mr William Jarker, of the heavy jaw, flattened nose, and general bull-dog aspect, was above his attic, whistling to his pigeons, as the Reverend Arthur Sterne stood by the reeking channel, gazing up into the strip of blue sky above his head, and following the circling flight of the birds as he muttered sadly to himself, "O, that I had wings like a dove; for then would I fly away and be at rest!" but the next instant he smiled sadly, as he recalled work undone, duties to perform, and then thought of the rest and fate of these birds, wondering, too, how it came that they should form the "fancy" of the roughest of the rough. Then he paused with his foot upon the threshold of the house where Septimus Hardon lodged, for there, in the hot, close London court, came gushing down in tones of purest liquid melody, the wild, heaven-gate trill of a lark: