About that time a man named Lake, a chimney-sweeper and scavenger, who lived in Tottenham Court Road, became, from the nature of his occupation, so obnoxious to his neighbours, that he, too, was compelled to take himself off to a fresh locality. My informant told me he was determined to go at once far enough out of London. He thought three miles in a westerly direction would make him safe, and finding a spot that suited him, he secured a lease of the land, and removed himself and his appendages to a place, now sometimes called Notting Dale, but more generally the “Potteries.” Here, for a short time, he enjoyed almost a solitary life. The population of the place, for the first year or two, consisted of only three persons. Whatever he may have suffered from loneliness, was, no doubt, abundantly made up to him by a sense of freedom, and an absence from all restraint, for his neighbours were distant and few. At length finding he could not use all the land he had leased, he naturally looked about for some one to share it with him. Alas! he was not company for every one. Eventually he heard of a man named Stephens, a bowstring maker, who, from the unsavoury nature of his trade, was enduring a similar persecution to that from which he himself had escaped. Lake invited this man to become his neighbour; and Stephens eventually purchased from him the lease of a plot of land for one hundred pounds, and removed his bowstring establishment to this new possession. Perhaps he did not find it answer to carry on his business so far from town: this does not appear in the narrative; but it is certain that, for some reason, he soon relinquished it, and commenced pig-keeping instead,—probably for the same reason as the bone-picker assigned for his attachment to his trade, that he shouldn’t think it all right, unless he could “feel a smell.” In his inquiries after pigs, &c., he became acquainted with the distress of the “West-end establishment,” and offered its members a share of the refuge which he and his friend Lake had found. The offer was gladly accepted, and many of the masters either bought or rented small plots of land from the original proprietors, and removed their establishments of pigs and children to this favoured spot, where Lake assured them everybody should do as they liked, and “he’d see that nobody meddled with them.” Under this magnificent charter and spirited government the little colony progressed rapidly, and numbers of houses, or rather huts, sprang up on all sides. Such things as drainage and fresh water were considered superfluous; and the accumulation of the filth of years rendered it certain, by the simple law of self-preservation, that nothing would be meddled with.