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half-a-crown. Which'll make five on you. And I'll go another seven and

sixpence to name which is the helplessest, the unborn baby or you!'

He was right in all his particulars. She came next day with a little

boy of three years old, and a little girl of two, and he stood entirely

corroborated.

'Got a room now; haven't you?' the turnkey asked the debtor after a week

or two.

'Yes, I have got a very good room.'

'Any little sticks a coming to furnish it?' said the turnkey.

'I expect a few necessary articles of furniture to be delivered by the

carrier, this afternoon.'

'Missis and little 'uns a coming to keep you company?' asked the

turnkey.

'Why, yes, we think it better that we should not be scattered, even for

a few weeks.'

'Even for a few weeks, OF course,' replied the turnkey. And he followed

him again with his eyes, and nodded his head seven times when he was

gone.

The affairs of this debtor were perplexed by a partnership, of which he

knew no more than that he had invested money in it; by legal matters

of assignment and settlement, conveyance here and conveyance there,

suspicion of unlawful preference of creditors in this direction, and of

mysterious spiriting away of property in that; and as nobody on the face

of the earth could be more incapable of explaining any single item in

the heap of confusion than the debtor himself, nothing comprehensible

could be made of his case. To question him in detail, and endeavour

to reconcile his answers; to closet him with accountants and sharp

practitioners, learned in the wiles of insolvency and bankruptcy; was

only to put the case out at compound interest and incomprehensibility.

The irresolute fingers fluttered more and more ineffectually about the

trembling lip on every such occasion, and the sharpest practitioners

gave him up as a hopeless job.

'Out?' said the turnkey, 'he'll never get out, unless his creditors take

him by the shoulders and shove him out.'

He had been there five or six months, when he came running to this

turnkey one forenoon to tell him, breathless and pale, that his wife was

ill.

'As anybody might a known she would be,' said the turnkey.

'We intended,' he returned, 'that she should go to a country lodging

only to-morrow. What am I to do! Oh, good heaven, what am I to do!'

'Don't waste your time in clasping your hands and biting your fingers,'

responded the practical turnkey, taking him by the elbow, 'but come

along with me.'

The turnkey conducted him--trembling from head to foot, and constantly

crying under his breath, What was he to do! while his irresolute fingers

bedabbled the tears upon his face--up one of the common staircases in

the prison to a door on the garret story. Upon which door the turnkey

knocked with the handle of his key.

'Come in!' cried a voice inside.

The turnkey, opening the door, disclosed in a wretched, ill-smelling

little room, two hoarse, puffy, red-faced personages seated at a

rickety table, playing at all-fours, smoking pipes, and drinking brandy.

'Doctor,' said the turnkey, 'here's a gentleman's wife in want of you

without a minute's loss of time!'

The doctor's friend was in the positive degree of hoarseness, puffiness,

red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt, and brandy; the doctor in

the comparative--hoarser, puffier, more red-faced, more all-fourey,

tobaccoer, dirtier, and brandier. The doctor was amazingly shabby, in

a torn and darned rough-weather sea-jacket, out at elbows and eminently

short of buttons (he had been in his time the experienced surgeon

carried by a passenger ship), the dirtiest white trousers conceivable by

mortal man, carpet slippers, and no visible linen. 'Childbed?' said

the doctor. 'I'm the boy!' With that the doctor took a comb from the

chimney-piece and stuck his hair upright--which appeared to be his

way of washing himself--produced a professional chest or case, of most

abject appearance, from the cupboard where his cup and saucer and coals

were, settled his chin in the frowsy wrapper round his neck, and became

a ghastly medical scarecrow.

The doctor and the debtor ran down-stairs, leaving the turnkey to return

to the lock, and made for the debtor's room. All the ladies in the

prison had got hold of the news, and were in the yard. Some of them

had already taken possession of the two children, and were hospitably

carrying them off; others were offering loans of little comforts from

their own scanty store; others were sympathising with the greatest

volubility. The gentlemen prisoners, feeling themselves at a

disadvantage, had for the most part retired, not to say sneaked,

to their rooms; from the open windows of which some of them now

complimented the doctor with whistles as he passed below, while others,

with several stories between them, interchanged sarcastic references to

the prevalent excitement.

It was a hot summer day, and the prison rooms were baking between the

high walls. In the debtor's confined chamber, Mrs Bangham, charwoman and

messenger, who was not a prisoner (though she had been once), but

was the popular medium of communication with the outer world, had

volunteered her services as fly-catcher and general attendant. The walls

and ceiling were blackened with flies. Mrs Bangham, expert in sudden

device, with one hand fanned the patient with a cabbage leaf, and with

the other set traps of vinegar and sugar in gallipots; at the same time

enunciating sentiments of an encouraging and congratulatory nature,

adapted to the occasion.

'The flies trouble you, don't they, my dear?' said Mrs Bangham. 'But

p'raps they'll take your mind off of it, and do you good. What between

the buryin ground, the grocer's, the waggon-stables, and the paunch

trade, the Marshalsea flies gets very large. P'raps they're sent as a

consolation, if we only know'd it. How are you now, my dear? No better?

No, my dear, it ain't to be expected; you'll be worse before you're

better, and you know it, don't you? Yes. That's right! And to think of

a sweet little cherub being born inside the lock! Now ain't it pretty,

ain't THAT something to carry you through it pleasant? Why, we ain't

had such a thing happen here, my dear, not for I couldn't name the time

when. And you a crying too?' said Mrs Bangham, to rally the patient more

and more. 'You! Making yourself so famous! With the flies a falling into

the gallipots by fifties! And everything a going on so well! And here if

there ain't,' said Mrs Bangham as the door opened, 'if there ain't your

dear gentleman along with Dr Haggage! And now indeed we ARE complete, I

THINK!'

The doctor was scarcely the kind of apparition to inspire a patient

with a sense of absolute completeness, but as he presently delivered the

opinion, 'We are as right as we can be, Mrs Bangham, and we shall

come out of this like a house afire;' and as he and Mrs Bangham took

possession of the poor helpless pair, as everybody else and anybody else

had always done, the means at hand were as good on the whole as better

would have been. The special feature in Dr Haggage's treatment of the

case, was his determination to keep Mrs Bangham up to the mark. As thus:

'Mrs Bangham,' said the doctor, before he had been there twenty minutes,

'go outside and fetch a little brandy, or we shall have you giving in.'

'Thank you, sir. But none on my accounts,' said Mrs Bangham.

'Mrs Bangham,' returned the doctor, 'I am in professional attendance

on this lady, and don't choose to allow any discussion on your part. Go

outside and fetch a little brandy, or I foresee that you'll break down.'

'You're to be obeyed, sir,' said Mrs Bangham, rising. 'If you was to put

your own lips to it, I think you wouldn't be the worse, for you look but

poorly, sir.'

'Mrs Bangham,' returned the doctor, 'I am not your business, thank you,

but you are mine. Never you mind ME, if you please. What you have got to

do, is, to do as you are told, and to go and get what I bid you.'

Mrs Bangham submitted; and the doctor, having administered her

potion, took his own. He repeated the treatment every hour, being very

determined with Mrs Bangham. Three or four hours passed; the flies

fell into the traps by hundreds; and at length one little life, hardly

stronger than theirs, appeared among the multitude of lesser deaths.

'A very nice little girl indeed,' said the doctor; 'little, but

well-formed. Halloa, Mrs Bangham! You're looking queer! You be off,

ma'am, this minute, and fetch a little more brandy, or we shall have you

in hysterics.'

By this time, the rings had begun to fall from the debtor's irresolute

hands, like leaves from a wintry tree. Not one was left upon them that

night, when he put something that chinked into the doctor's greasy palm.

In the meantime Mrs Bangham had been out on an errand to a neighbouring

establishment decorated with three golden balls, where she was very well

known.

'Thank you,' said the doctor, 'thank you. Your good lady is quite

composed. Doing charmingly.'

'I am very happy and very thankful to know it,' said the debtor, 'though

I little thought once, that--'

'That a child would be born to you in a place like this?' said the

doctor. 'Bah, bah, sir, what does it signify? A little more elbow-room

is all we want here. We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here;

there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a

man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man's at

home, and to say he'll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes

threatening letters about money to this place. It's freedom, sir, it's

freedom! I have had to-day's practice at home and abroad, on a march,

and aboard ship, and I'll tell you this: I don't know that I have ever

pursued it under such quiet circumstances as here this day. Elsewhere,

people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one

thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir. We

have done all that--we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom,

we can't fall, and what have we found? Peace. That's the word for

it. Peace.' With this profession of faith, the doctor, who was an old

jail-bird, and was more sodden than usual, and had the additional and

unusual stimulus of money in his pocket, returned to his associate and

chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt,

and brandy.

Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he had

already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle, to the

same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a

dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that

kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with

strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have

broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he

was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took

one step upward.

When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would make

plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen agents in

succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor end of them or

him, he found his miserable place of refuge a quieter refuge than it

had been before. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder

children now played regularly about the yard, and everybody knew the

baby, and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.

'Why, I'm getting proud of you,' said his friend the turnkey, one day.

'You'll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea wouldn't be like

the Marshalsea now, without you and your family.'

The turnkey really was proud of him. He would mention him in laudatory

terms to new-comers, when his back was turned. 'You took notice of him,'

he would say, 'that went out of the lodge just now?'

New-comer would probably answer Yes.

'Brought up as a gentleman, he was, if ever a man was. Ed'cated at no

end of expense. Went into the Marshal's house once to try a new piano

for him. Played it, I understand, like one o'clock--beautiful! As to

languages--speaks anything. We've had a Frenchman here in his time, and

it's my opinion he knowed more French than the Frenchman did. We've had

an Italian here in his time, and he shut him up in about half a minute.

You'll find some characters behind other locks, I don't say you won't;

but if you want the top sawyer in such respects as I've mentioned, you

must come to the Marshalsea.'

When his youngest child was eight years old, his wife, who had long been

languishing away--of her own inherent weakness, not that she retained

any greater sensitiveness as to her place of abode than he did--went

upon a visit to a poor friend and old nurse in the country, and died

there. He remained shut up in his room for a fortnight afterwards;

and an attorney's clerk, who was going through the Insolvent Court,

engrossed an address of condolence to him, which looked like a Lease,

and which all the prisoners signed.

When he appeared again he was greyer (he had soon begun to turn grey);

and the turnkey noticed that his hands went often to his trembling lips

again, as they had used to do when he first came in.

But he got pretty well over it in a month or two; and in the meantime

the children played about the yard as regularly as ever, but in black.

Then Mrs Bangham, long popular medium of communication with the outer

world, began to be infirm, and to be found oftener than usual comatose