Fitzgeorge-street before the coming of Philip Sheldon. The house had
been unoccupied for upwards of a year, and was in the last stage of
shabbiness and decay, when the bills disappeared all at once from the
windows, and busy painters and bricklayers set their ladders against
the dingy brickwork. Mr. Sheldon took the house on a long lease, and
spent two or three hundred pounds in the embellishment of it. Upon the
completion of all repairs and decorations, two great waggon-loads of
furniture, distinguished by that old fashioned clumsiness which is
eminently suggestive of respectability, arrived from the Euston-square
terminus, while a young man of meditative aspect might have been seen
on his knees, now in one empty chamber, anon in another, performing
some species of indoor surveying, with a three-foot rule, a loose little
oblong memorandum-book, and the merest stump of a square lead-pencil.
This was an emissary from the carpet warehouse; and before nightfall it
was known to more than on inhabitant in Fitzgeorge-street that the
stranger was going to lay down new carpets. The new-comer was evidently
of an active and energetic temperament, for within three days of his
arrival the brass-plate on his street-door announced his profession,
while a neat little glass-case, on a level with the eye of the passing
pedestrian, exhibited specimens of his skill in mechanical dentistry,
and afforded instruction and amusement to the boys of the neighbourhood,
who criticised the glistening white teeth and impossibly red gums,
displayed behind the plate-glass, with a like vigour and freedom of
language. Nor did Mr. Sheldon's announcement of his profession confine
itself to the brass-plate and the glass-case. A shabby-genteel young
man pervaded the neighbourhood for some days after the surgeon-dentist's
advent, knocking a postman's knock, which only lacked the galvanic
sharpness of the professional touch, and delivering neatly-printed
circulars to the effect that Mr. Sheldon, surgeon-dentist, of 14
Fitzgeorge-street, had invented some novel method of adjusting false