He walked through the quiet narrow streets, with their gabled houses, craning their necks across the road to pry into one another's affairs; and he saw the churches where the people were married; and the habitations where the doctors lived, who were knocked up when the people were born; and he accidentally passed the residence of Mrs. Pitcher, who likewise officiated on those occasions; and he remarked an infinity of shops where every commodity of life was sold. He saw the offices of the lawyers who made the people's wills, the banks where the people kept their money, the shops of the undertakers who made the people's coffins, the church-yards where the people were buried, but _not_ the Registry where the people's wills were taken care of. "Very extraordinary!" said Mr. Wallace. "In the great city of a great ecclesiastical see, where all kinds of moving reverses and disasters have been occurring for many centuries, where all manner of old foundation and usage, piety, and superstition, were, and a great deal of modern wealth is, a very interesting and an unimpeachable Registry there must be, somewhere!" In search of this great public edifice, the indefatigable Mr. Wallace prowled through the city. He discovered many mansions; but he _could not_ satisfy himself about the Registry. The uneasiness of Mr. Wallace's mind increasing with the growth of his suspicion that there must surely be a flaw in the old adage, and that where there was a will (and a great many wills) there was no way at all, he betook himself to the Cathedral-close. Passing down an uncommonly pure, clean, tidy little street, where the houses looked like a tasteful sort of missionary-subscription-boxes, into which subscribers of a larger growth were expected to drop their money down the chimneys, he came by a turnstile, into that haven of rest, and looked about him. "Do you know where the Registry is?" he asked a farmer-looking man. "The wa'at!" said he. "The Registry; where they keep the wills?" "A'dinnot know for shower," said the farmer, looking round. "Ding! If I shouldn't wondther if _thot_ wur it!" Mr. Wallace concealed his disparaging appreciation of the farmer's judgment, when he pointed with his ash-stick to a kind of shed--such as is usually called a lean-to--squeezing itself, as if it were (with very good reason) ashamed, into the south-west corner of the cross, which the ground-plan of the cathedral forms, and sticking to it like a dirty little pimple. But, what was his dismay, on going thither to inquire, to discover that this actually WAS the unimpeachable Registry; and that a confined den within, which would have made an indifferent chandler's shop, with a pestilent little chimney in it, filling it with smoke like a Lapland hut, was the "Searching Office."