is filled with a perpetual stream of clattering junior clerks from the adjacent warehouses. The Crown--according to its proprietor, in whose family its lease has been vested since its establishment--don't do nothin' of this sort, and don't want to. It still regards chops and steaks as the most delicious of human food, and tea and coffee as the only beverages by which their consumption should be accompanied. Across its window still stretches an illuminated blind representing an Italian gentleman putting off in a boat with apparently nothing more serviceable for navigation purposes than a blue banjo; and it still makes a gorgeous display of two large coffee-cups and saucers, with one egg in a blue egg-cup between them. Its interior is still cut up into brown boxes with hard narrow seats, on which you must either sit bolt upright, or fall off at once; its narrow old tables are scarred and notched and worm-eaten; and it holds yet by its sawdusted floor. About seven o'clock in the evening of the same day on which Inspector Stellfox had consulted Mr. Moss, the green-baize door of the Crown was gently swung open, and a man slinking in dived into the nearest box then vacant. He was a young fellow of not more than three-and-twenty, with well-cut regular features, and who would have been handsome had not his complexion been so sallow and his cheeks so pinched. His gaunt attenuated frame, thin hands, and eyes of unnatural brightness and restlessness, all told of recent illness; and though it was summer time his threadbare coat was tightly buttoned round his throat, and he shivered as he seated himself, and looked hungrily at the cooking-fire burning in the kitchen at the other end of the shop. After furtively glancing round him he beckoned the proprietor, gave him an order for some small refreshment, and then taking down an old volume of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ from a neighbouring shelf, began to turn over its pages in a listless, purposeless manner. While he was thus engaged, the green-baize door swung open again, admitting a portly man with a child's hat perched on the top of his round head, who, walking into the middle of the shop, ordered from that post of vantage "a large cup of coffee and a rasher," then looked round the different boxes, and finally settled himself with his back to the light in that box where the last arrival was seated. The portly man made the other visitor a very polite bow, which was scarcely returned, and the first comer bent more earnestly over his book and shrouded his face with his hand. But the portly man, who was no other than Inspector Stellfox, had been too long in his profession not to know his business thoroughly, and so he hung up the child's hat on a peg immediately over his friend's head, and he took hold of a newspaper which lay directly under his friend's elbow; and taking advantage of each opportunity to look his friend over and over, saw that he was on the