idence having made it
alive to the least nibble; it is situated just above the hip-joint,
it is protected by a tegument of exquisite fibre, vulgarly called
"THE BREECHES POCKET." The thoroughbred Anthropophagite usually
begins with his own relations and friends; and so long as he
confines his voracity to the domestic circle, the law interferes
little, if at all, with his venerable propensities. But when he has
exhausted all that allows itself to be edible in the bosom of
private life, the man-eater falls loose on society, and takes to
prowling,--then "Sauve qui peut!" the laws rouse themselves, put on
their spectacles, call for their wigs and gowns, and the
Anthropophagite turned prowler is not always sure of his dinner. It
is when he has arrived at this stage of development that the man-
eater becomes of importance, enters into the domain of history, and
occupies the thoughts of Moralists.

On the same morning in which Waife thus went forth from the Saracen's
Head in quest of the doctor, but at a later hour, a man, who, to judge
by the elaborate smartness of his attire, and the jaunty assurance of
his saunter, must have wandered from the gay purlieus of Regent Street,
threaded his way along the silent and desolate thoroughfares that
intersect the remotest districts of Bloomsbury. He stopped at the turn
into a small street still more sequestered than those which led to it,
and looked up to the angle on the wall whereon the name of the street
should have been inscribed. But the wall had been lately whitewashed,
and the whitewash had obliterated the expected epigraph. The man
muttered an impatient execration; and, turning round as if to seek a
passenger of whom to make inquiry, beheld on the opposite side of the
way another man apparently engaged in the same research. Involuntarily
each crossed over the road towards the other.

"Pray, sir," quoth the second wayfarer in that desert, "can you tell me
if this is a street that is called a Place,--Podden Place, Upper?"

"Sir," returned the sprucer wayfarer, "it is the question I would have
asked of you."

"Strange!"

"Very strange indeed that more than one person can, in this busy age,
employ himself in discovering a Podden Place! Not a soul to inquire
of,--not a shop that I see, not an orange-stall!"

"Ha!" cried the other, in a hoarse sepulchral voice, "Ha! there is
a pot-boy! Boy! boy! boy! I say. Hold, there! hold! Is this P