To find Barkers Inn was much the same to an ordinary person as looking for a needle in the proverbial haystack. Dick Latimer, however, knew its exact whereabouts, because he lived there, and on this foggy November night he was making for it unerringly with the homing instinct of a bee. Leaving Fleet Street behind him, somewhere about eleven-thirty, he turned into Chancery Lane, and then struck off to the right down a by-road which narrowed to an alley¹, and finally ended in a cul-de-sac. Here the young man hurried through the rusty² iron gates of a granite³ archway, and found himself in an oblong courtyard paved with cobble-stones and surrounded by tumble-down houses with steep roofs of discolored tiles. A few steps took him across this to a crooked⁴ little door, which he entered to mount a crooked little staircase, and in one minute he was on the first-floor landing, where a tiny gas-jet pricked⁵ the gloom with a bluish spot of light. Hastily using his latchkey, he admitted himself through a door on the left into a stuffy⁶ dark passage, technically⁸ called the entrance hall. Eventually entering the sitting-room⁹, he hurled¹⁰ himself into a creaking basket-chair, and gave thanks to the gods of home that he had arrived.