CHAPTER XVIII.
A DAY WITH ONE OF THE NAVVIES .-- MORNING On the morning after this conversation with Alaric, Charley left his lodgings with a heavy heart, and wended his way towards Mecklenburg Square.

At the corner of Davies Street he got an omnibus, which for fourpence took him to one of the little alleys near Gray's Inn, and there he got down, and threading the well-known locality, through Bedford Place and across Theobald's Road, soon found himself at the door of his generous patron.

Oh! how he hated the house; how he hated the blear-eyed, cross-grained, dirty, impudent fish-fag of an old woman who opened the door for him; how he hated Mr.Jabesh M'Ruen, to whom he now came a supplicant for assistance, and how, above all, he hated himself for being there.
He was shown into Mr.M'Ruen's little front parlour, where he had to wait for fifteen minutes, while his patron made such a breakfast as generally falls to the lot of such men.

We can imagine the rancid butter, the stale befingered bread, the ha'porth of sky-blue milk, the tea innocent of China's wrongs, and the soiled cloth.

Mr.M'Ruen always did keep Charley waiting fifteen minutes, and so he was no whit surprised; the doing so was a part of the tremendous interest which the wretched old usurer received for his driblets of money.
There was not a bit of furniture in the room on which Charley had not speculated till speculation could go no further; the old escritoire or secretaire which Mr.M'Ruen always opened the moment he came into the room; the rickety Pembroke table, covered with dirty papers which stood in the middle of it; the horsehair-bottomed chairs, on which Charley declined to sit down, unless he had on his thickest winter trousers, so perpendicular had become some atoms on the surface, which, when new, had no doubt been horizontal; the ornaments (!) on the chimney, broken bits of filthy crockery, full of wisps of paper, with a china duck without a tail, and a dog to correspond without a head; the pictures against the wall, with their tarnished dingy frames and cracked glasses, representing three of the Seasons; how the fourth had gone before its time to its final bourne by an unhappy chance, Mr.M'Ruen had once explained to Charley, while endeavouring to make his young customer take the other three as a good value for L7 10s.