When he kissed me, and bade me adieu with a sigh,
    By the light of the sweetest of moons,
  Oh, how little I dreamt I was bidding good-bye
    To my Misses’s teapot and spoons!

MR TESTATOR
[Sidenote:  Charles Dickens]

Mr. Testator took a set of chambers in Lyons Inn when he had but very scanty furniture for his bedroom, and none for his sitting-room.  He had lived some wintry months in this condition, and had found it very bare and cold.  One night, past midnight, when he sat writing and still had writing to do that must be done before he went to bed, he found himself out of coals.  He had coals downstairs, but had never been to his cellar; however, the cellar-key was on his mantelshelf, and if he went down and opened the cellar it fitted, he might fairly assume the coals in that cellar to be his.  As to his laundress, she lived among the coal-wagons and Thames watermen—­for there were Thames watermen at that time—­in some unknown rat-hole by the river, down lanes and alleys on the other side of the Strand.  As to any other person to meet him or obstruct him, Lyons Inn was dreaming, drunk, maudlin, moody, betting, brooding over bill-discounting or renewing—­asleep or awake, minding its own affairs.  Mr. Testator took his coal-scuttle in one hand, 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