"That Purty Bill is one of the greatest scoundrels in London. He is a fence, and we've got him once or twice, but he minds himself now, and we are after his tricks every day. His cellar used to be a brewery, that's why he's got so much room underground, and his game is to let out lodgings, at two pence a night, for a blind, and then they can stay all day at this place until twelve o'clock at night, and if they cannot pay sure for the next night's lodging in advance, unless they are in very good circumstances, he clubs them out, and they have got to pad the hoof until daybreak, and sleep where they can. Good night." And we parted for that twenty-four hours. [Illustration] CHAPTER VI. DEBATING CLUBS AND COGERS'S HALL. SHOE lane hath a very unromantic sound for a locality. It does not smell of the aristocracy. It hath not even a slight favor of the Landed Gentry, and no one could possibly take the trouble to find armorial bearings or hatchments for Shoe lane. Yet is Shoe lane a most eloquent place, and there is a little old public house there deemed second only in point of fame by the admirers of forensic eloquence who frequent it, to the House of Commons. The way was long and dreary that Saturday night that I strolled from Long Acre, whose carriage-shops and leather manufacturers' stalls were all closed for the day; and the sultry London fog came down, blinding the pedestrians, as I turned from Lincoln's-Inn-fields into the better-lighted High Holborn, with the glare from its brassy gin-shops and dirty-looking old houses, that seemed all of them as if a good scouring would have done them an incalculable service in the way of a fresher appearance. I thought that Shoe lane was in a very suspicious neighborhood. Turning to the left through Farringdon Market, a huge square seemingly devoted to the worship of highly odorous vegetables, I came into the narrow Shoe lane, which runs down at its bottom to Fleet street, just below where the gray stone arch of Temple bar bisects the Strand and Fleet street. There is nothing particularly noticeable about this part of Shoe lane. [Sidenote: SHOE LANE.] There is a ham and beef shop, with its layers of cold meat-pies piled on top of each other in the windows; and across the way there is the inevitable gin-shop, with its polished brass fender outside to keep off the boys who have no money to spend in gin, and there are the enticing signs all over the gin-shop telling of the merits of the brown-stout there vended, and the Burton ale and somebody's "entire" malt liquors which the proprietor assures the public are only genuine at his shop.