Behind this shop was a wainscoted parlour, looking first into a paved
yard, and beyond that again into a little terrace garden, raised some
feet above it. Any stranger would have supposed that this wainscoted
parlour, saving for the door of communication by which he had entered,
was cut off and detached from all the world; and indeed most strangers
on their first entrance were observed to grow extremely thoughtful, as
weighing and pondering in their minds whether the upper rooms were only
approachable by ladders from without; never suspecting that two of
the most unassuming and unlikely doors in existence, which the most
ingenious mechanician on earth must of necessity have supposed to be
the doors of closets, opened out of this room--each without the smallest
preparation, or so much as a quarter of an inch of passage--upon two
dark winding flights of stairs, the one upward, the other downward,
which were the sole means of communication between that chamber and the
other portions of the house.
With all these oddities, there was not a neater, more scrupulously tidy,
or more punctiliously ordered house, in Clerkenwell, in London, in all
England. There were not cleaner windows, or whiter floors, or brighter
Stoves, or more highly shining articles of furniture in old mahogany;
there was not more rubbing, scrubbing, burnishing and polishing, in the
whole street put together.
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