When I first, cheapened my lodgings, the landlady told me, that she
hoped I was not an author, for the lodgers on the first floor had
stipulated that the upper rooms should not be occupied by a noisy trade.
I very readily promised to give no disturbance to her family, and soon
despatched a bargain on the usual terms.
I had not slept many nights in my new apartment before I began to
inquire after my predecessors, and found my landlady, whose imagination
is filled chiefly with her own affairs, very ready to give me
information.
Curiosity, like all other desires, produces pain as wel as pleasure.
Before she began her narrative, I had heated my head with expectations
of adventures and discoveries, of elegance in disguise, and learning in
distress; and was somewhat mortified when I heard that the first tenant
was a tailor, of whom nothing was remembered but that he complained of
his room for want of light; and, after having lodged in it a month, and
paid only a week's rent, pawned a piece of cloth which he was trusted,
to cut out, and was forced to make a precipitate retreat from this
quarter of the town.
The next was a young woman newly arrived from the country, who lived for
five weeks with great regularity, and became by frequent treats very
much the favourite of the family, but at last received visits so
frequently from a cousin in Cheapside, that she brought the reputation
of the house into danger, and was therefore dismissed with good advice.
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