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The next morning found Nigel Olifaunt, the young Lord of Glenvarloch,
seated, sad and solitary, in his little apartment, in the mansion of
John Christie, the ship-chandler; which that honest tradesman, in
gratitude perhaps to the profession from which he derived his chief
support, appeared to have constructed as nearly as possible upon the
plan of a ship's cabin.
It was situated near to Paul's Wharf, at the end of one of those
intricate and narrow lanes, which, until that part of the city was
swept away by the Great Fire in 1666, constituted an extraordinary
labyrinth of small, dark, damp, and unwholesome streets and alleys, in
one corner or other of which the plague was then as surely found
lurking, as in the obscure corners of Constantinople in our own time.
But John Christie's house looked out upon the river, and had the
advantage, therefore, of free air, impregnated, however, with the
odoriferous fumes of the articles in which the ship-chandler dealt,
with the odour of pitch, and the natural scent of the ooze and sludge
left by the reflux of the tide.
Upon the whole, except that his dwelling did not float with the flood-
tide, and become stranded with the ebb, the young lord was nearly as
comfortably accommodated as he was while on board the little trading
brig from the long town of Kirkaldy, in Fife, by which he had come a
passenger to London.
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