Among the habitations of eighteenth-century London, it would have been difficult to find a more dismal den than that house of entertainment which Mr. Marjory and his family kept for insolvent debtors, and which, with two other houses of the same stamp, formed a kind of antechamber to the Fleet Prison, where Governor Bambridge at this period reigned supreme. Hovels there were more squalid, rottener roofs, and darker garrets than those of Marjory, within sound of Bow bells; abodes where crime was rifer, and where midnight orgies and midnight quarrels were of a more brutal character than such as resounded under Mr. Marjory's roof-tree. But for sheer gloom, and for dulness and despair, the Marjory establishment was scarcely to be matched. There needed no inscription above the greasy portal to tell that he who entered there left hope behind him. There was an atmosphere of hopelessness in that establishment which needed no translation in words. And yet there were rioters who drank and gamed and put on a show of joviality within those abhorred precincts; but these were only the hardened few--reprobates so steeped in vice and ignominy, that they would have made merry in Newgate on the eve of an execution. Louis Fétis had been a dweller in that sinister abode for more than a week. At the commencement of his captivity he had carried himself haughtily enough; had blustered and swaggered, and told his gaolers that the debt for which he was arrested was but a bagatelle, which he should be able to settle off-hand directly he had communicated with his friends. He had sent a ticket-porter to Soho Square and Poland Street, with messages to his wife and to Mr. Topsparkle. There had been some difficulty about finding letter-paper, or he would have written; but he was too impatient to wait while Marjory's down-at-heel daughter hunted for a couple of sheets of paper and a pen. The reply in both cases had been in the negative. His wife could not help him; his master would not. "You have been drawing upon me very heavily of late, my good Fétis, and I have your notes of hand to the amount of some thousands," wrote Topsparkle. "You cannot, therefore, expect that I shall hasten to your rescue, when a less forbearing creditor claps you in prison. Your house and furniture must be worth something; so, no doubt, Mrs. Fétis will be able to raise money enough to extricate you. For my own part, I am your milch cow no longer." Mrs. Fétis informed her dearest husband, upon paper blotted with her tears, that she had not a guinea in her possession. She would have flown to him to comfort and weep with him, but the shock of his arrest had made her so ill that she was unable to leave her bed.