cleanliness which the white apron expressed were belied by the postures and gaits of the women who wore it—­their knuckles being mostly on their hips (an attitude which lent them the aspect of two-handled mugs), and their shoulders against door-posts; while there was a curious alacrity in the turn of each honest woman’s head upon her neck and in the twirl of her honest eyes, at any noise resembling a masculine footfall along the lane.

Yet amid so much that was bad needy respectability also found a home.  Under some of the roofs abode pure and virtuous souls whose presence there was due to the iron hand of necessity, and to that alone.  Families from decayed villages—­families of that once bulky, but now nearly extinct, section of village society called “liviers,” or lifeholders—­copyholders and others, whose roof-trees had fallen for some reason or other, compelling them to quit the rural spot that had been their home for generations—­came here, unless they chose to lie under a hedge by the wayside.

The inn called Peter’s finger was the church of Mixen Lane.

It was centrally situate, as such places should be, and bore about the same social relation to the Three Mariners as the latter bore to the King’s Arms.  At first sight the inn was so respectable as to be puzzling.  The front door was kept shut, and the step was so clean that evidently but few persons entered over its sanded surface.  But at the corner of the public-house was an alley, a mere slit, dividing it from the next building.  Half-way up the alley was a narrow door, shiny and paintless from the rub of infinite hands and shoulders.  This was the actual entrance to the inn.

A pedestrian would be seen abstractedly passing along Mixen Lane; and then, in a moment, he would vanish, causing the gazer to blink like Ashton at the disappearance of Ravenswood.  That abstracted pedestrian had edged into the slit by the adroit fillip of his person sideways; from the slit he edged into the tavern by a similar exercise of skill.

The company at the Three Mariners were persons of quality in comparison with the company which gathered here; though it must be admitted that the lowest fringe of the Mariner’s party touched the crest of Peter’s at points.  Waifs and strays of all sorts loitered about here.  The landlady was a virtuous woman who years ago had been unjustly sent to gaol as an accessory to something or other after the fact.  She underwent her twelvemonth, and had worn a martyr’s countenance ever since, except at times of meeting the constable who apprehended her, when she winked her eye.

To this house Jopp and his acquaintances had arrived.  The settles on which they sat down were thin and tall, their tops being guyed by pieces of twine to hooks in the ceiling; for when the guests grew boisterous the settles would rock and overturn without some such security.  The thunder of bowls echoed from the backyard; swingels hung behind the blower of the chimney; and ex-poachers and ex-gamekeepers, whom squires had persecuted without a cause, sat elbowing each other—­men who in past times had met in fights under the moon, till lapse of sentences on the one part, and loss of favour and expulsion from service on the other, brought them here together to a common level, where they sat calmly discussing old times.