ore--Gad, I'll go and see him, hang me if I
don't."

And having ascertained from Morgan that he could reach the Temple
without much difficulty, and that a city omnibus would put him down
at the gate, the Major one day after breakfast at his Club--not the
Polyanthus, whereof Mr. Pen was just elected a member, but another Club:
for the Major was too wise to have a nephew as a constant inmate of any
house where he was in the habit of passing his time--the Major one day
entered one of those public vehicles, and bade the conductor to put him
down at the gate of the Upper Temple.

When Major Pendennis reached that dingy portal it was about twelve
o'clock in the day; and he was directed by a civil personage with a
badge and a white apron, through some dark alleys, and under various
melancholy archways into courts each more dismal than the other, until
finally he reached Lamb Court. If it was dark in Pall Mail, what was it
in Lamb Court? Candles were burning in many of the rooms there--in the
pupil-room of Mr. Hodgeman, the special pleader, where six pupils were
scribbling declarations under the tallow; in Sir Hokey Walker's clerk's
room, where the clerk, a person far more gentlemanlike and cheerful in
appearance than the celebrated counsel, his master, was conversing in a
patronising manner with the managing clerk of an attorney at the door;
and in Curling the wigmaker's melancholy shop, where, from behind the
feeble glimmer of a couple of lights, large serpents' and judges' wigs
were looming drearily, with the blank blocks looking at the lamp-post in
the court. Two little clerks were playing at toss-halfpenny under that
lamp. A laundress in pattens passed in at one door, a newspaper boy
issued from another. A porter, whose white apron was faintly visible,
paced up and down. It would be impossible to conceive a place more
dismal, and the Major shuddered to think that any one should select such
a residence. "Good Ged!" he said, "the poor boy mustn't live on here."

The feeble and filthy oil-lamps, with which the staircases of the Upper
Temple are lighted of nights, were of course not illuminating the stairs
by day, and Major Pendennis, having read with difficulty his nephew's
name under Mr. Warrington's on the wall of No. 6, found still greater
difficulty in climbing the abominable black stairs, up the banisters of
which, which contributed their damp exudations to his gloves, he groped
painfully until he came to the third sto