d, his candle and key in
the other, and descended to the dismallest underground dens of Lyons
Inn, where the late vehicles in the streets became thunderous and all
the water-pipes in the neighbourhood seemed to have Macbeth's Amen
sticking in their throats, and to be trying to get it out. After groping
here and there among low doors to no purpose, Mr. Testator at length
came to a door with a rusty padlock which his key fitted. Getting the
door open with much trouble, and looking in, he found no coals, but a
confused pile of furniture. Alarmed by this intrusion on another man's
property, he locked the door again, found his own cellar, filled his
scuttle, and returned upstairs.

But the furniture he had seen ran on castors across and across Mr.
Testator's mind incessantly, when, in the chill hour of five in the
morning, he got to bed. He particularly wanted a table to write at, and
a table expressly made to be written at had been the piece of furniture
in the foreground of the heap. When his laundress emerged from her
burrow in the morning to make his kettle boil, he artfully led up to the
subject of cellars and furniture; but the two ideas had evidently no
connection in her mind. When she left him, and he sat at his breakfast,
thinking about the furniture, he recalled the rusty state of the
padlock, and inferred that the furniture must have been stored in the
cellar for a long time--was perhaps forgotten--owner dead perhaps? After
thinking it over a few days, in the course of which he could pump
nothing out of Lyons Inn about the furniture, he became desperate, and
resolved to borrow that table. He did so, that night. He had not had the
table long, when he determined to borrow an easy-chair; he had not had
that long, when he made up his mind to borrow a bookcase; then, a
couch; then, a carpet and rug. By that time, he felt he was "in
furniture stepped in so far," as that it could be no worse to borrow it
all. Consequently, he borrowed it all, and locked up the cellar for
good. He had always locked it, after every visit. He had carried up
every separate article in the dead of night, and, at the best, had felt
as wicked as a Resurrection Man. Every article was blue and furry when
brought into his rooms, and he had had, in a murderous and guilty sort
of way, to polish it up while London slept.

Mr. Testator lived in his furnished chambers two or three years, or
more, and gradually lulled himself into the opinion that the f