On the same morning in which Waife thus went forth from the Saracen's
Head in quest of the doctor, but at a later hour, a man, who, to judge by
the elaborate smartness of his attire, and the jaunty assurance of his
saunter, must have wandered from the gay purlieus of Regent Street,
threaded his way along the silent and desolate thoroughfares that
intersect the remotest districts of Bloomsbury. He stopped at the turn
into a small street still more sequestered than those which led to it,
and looked up to the angle on the wall whereon the name of the street
should have been inscribed. But the wall had been lately whitewashed,
and the whitewash had obliterated the expected epigraph. The man
muttered an impatient execration; and, turning round as if to seek a
passenger of whom to make inquiry, beheld on the opposite side of the way
another man apparently engaged in the same research. Involuntarily each
crossed over the road towards the other.

"Pray, sir," quoth the second wayfarer in that desert, "can you tell me
if this is a street that is called a Place,--Podden Place, Upper?"

"Sir," returned the sprucer wayfarer, "it is the question I would have
asked of you."

"Strange!"

"Very strange indeed that more than one person can, in this busy age,
employ himself in discovering a Podden Place! Not a soul to inquire of,
--not a shop that I see, not an orange-stall!"

"Ha!" cried the other, in a hoarse sepulchral voice, "Ha! there is a pot-
boy! Boy! boy! boy! I say. Hold, there! hold! Is this Podden Place,