But no one knew where Matt slept, and many a job he lost in consequence; though this he set down to the score of his ill-luck. And yet he need not have been so nervous about anyone tracking him to his den; for Lower Series-place was once the resort of many of the choice spirits of a bygone age: lordly gallants strutted there in the showy costumes of their day; here, too, was the famous Kit-cat Club; but the glory had departed when Matt chose the court for his resting-place: where the wits made their rendezvous, were misery and dirt, frouzy rotting tenements, vice and disease. Trade was in the place, but in its lowest and least attractive forms; for there might be bought "half-hundreds" of coals in little sacks; ginger-beer; great spongy-shelled oysters, opened by dirty women, ready to place a discoloured thumb upon the loosened bivalve, and to rinse it in the muddy tub from which it was fished; fruit, too, in its seasons; potatoes and greens always; mussels, farthing balls of cotton, brass thimbles, comic songs, and sweets. But the two most flourishing trades here were those of translating, and dealing in marine-stores--businesses carried on next door to one another by Isaac Gross and Mrs Slagg. And a busy shop was Mrs Slagg's, a shop where, in place of the customary gibbeted black doll, hung a painted and lettered huge bladebone that might, from its size, have belonged to the celebrated vastotherium itself, only that it was composed of wood, carved in his leisure hours with a shoemaker's knife, as a delicate attention to Mrs Slagg, by her neighbour, Isaac Gross. Gay was Mrs Slagg's shop with gaudily-illustrated placards, touching the wealth, ease, and comfort to be obtained by carrying all the worn apparel, rags, bones, and old iron to Slagg's; serving-maids were walking out in the gayest of dresses bought with kitchen-stuff; men were fitting on impossible tail-coats and solid-looking hats bought with old iron, brass, and pewter; while the demand for white and coloured rags, waste-paper, bones, and horsehair, appeared insatiable; and to obtain them, it seemed that Mrs Slagg was ready to ruin herself outright by giving unheard-of prices. A wonderfully heterogeneous collection was here of the odds and ends of civilisation: one pane of the window resembled the foul comb of some mammoth bee, filled up as it was with bottles presenting their ends to the spectator, who shuddered as he thought of the labels that once decked those vials, such as "The draught at bedtime," "The mixture as before," "A tablespoonful every two hours," etc; while many a wild and fevered dream that shudder brought back, of nights followed by days of pain and misery, aching heads, watching, anxious faces, sleek doctors of the Hardon class, wondering thoughts of the future, and of past hours unappreciated, unvalued. Every medicine-bottle in Mrs Slagg's shop was a very telescope, which, if applied to the eye, presented such a diorama of sickness and sorrow as