n to undress;
but he did exactly the reverse, and dressed himself from head to foot,
saving his shoes. When he had so done, he lay down upon his bed with
some of its coverings over him, and his coat still tied round his neck,
to get through the night.

When he started up, the Godfather Break of Day was peeping at its
namesake. He rose, took his shoes in his hand, turned the key in the
door with great caution, and crept downstairs. Nothing was astir there
but the smell of coffee, wine, tobacco, and syrups; and madame's little
counter looked ghastly enough. But he had paid madame his little note
at it over night, and wanted to see nobody--wanted nothing but to get on
his shoes and his knapsack, open the door, and run away.

He prospered in his object. No movement or voice was heard when he
opened the door; no wicked head tied up in a ragged handkerchief looked
out of the upper window. When the sun had raised his full disc above the
flat line of the horizon, and was striking fire out of the long muddy
vista of paved road with its weary avenue of little trees, a black speck
moved along the road and splashed among the flaming pools of rain-water,
which black speck was John Baptist Cavalletto running away from his
patron.

CHAPTER 12. Bleeding Heart Yard

In London itself, though in the old rustic road towards a suburb of note
where in the days of William Shakespeare, author and stage-player, there
were Royal hunting-seats--howbeit no sport is left there now but for
hunters of men--Bleeding Heart Yard was to be found; a place much
changed in feature and in fortune, yet with some relish of ancient
greatness about it. Two or three mighty stacks of chimneys, and a few
large dark rooms which had escaped being walled and subdivided out of
the recognition of their old proportions, gave the Yard a character.
It was inhabited by poor people, who set up their rest among its faded
glories, as Arabs of the desert pitch their tents among the fallen
stones of the Pyramids; but there was a family sentimental feeling
prevalent in the Yard, that it had a character.

As if the aspiring city had become puffed up in the very ground on which
it stood, the ground had so risen about Bleeding Heart Yard that you
got into it down a flight of steps which formed no part of the original
approach, and got out of it by a low gateway into a maze of shabby
streets, which went about and about, tortuously ascending to the level
again. At this e