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exceedingly ugly, though it was only redeemed from being so by a smile;

a good-humoured smile, and pleasant in itself, but rendered pitiable

by being constantly there. A great white cap, with a quantity of

opaque frilling that was always flapping about, apologised for Maggy's

baldness, and made it so very difficult for her old black bonnet to

retain its place upon her head, that it held on round her neck like a

gipsy's baby. A commission of haberdashers could alone have reported

what the rest of her poor dress was made of, but it had a strong general

resemblance to seaweed, with here and there a gigantic tea-leaf. Her

shawl looked particularly like a tea-leaf after long infusion.

Arthur Clennam looked at Little Dorrit with the expression of one

saying, 'May I ask who this is?' Little Dorrit, whose hand this Maggy,

still calling her little mother, had begun to fondle, answered in words

(they were under a gateway into which the majority of the potatoes had

rolled).

'This is Maggy, sir.'

'Maggy, sir,' echoed the personage presented. 'Little mother!'

'She is the grand-daughter--' said Little Dorrit.

'Grand-daughter,' echoed Maggy.

'Of my old nurse, who has been dead a long time. Maggy, how old are

you?'

'Ten, mother,' said Maggy.

'You can't think how good she is, sir,' said Little Dorrit, with

infinite tenderness.

'Good SHE is,' echoed Maggy, transferring the pronoun in a most

expressive way from herself to her little mother.

'Or how clever,' said Little Dorrit. 'She goes on errands as well as

any one.' Maggy laughed. 'And is as trustworthy as the Bank of England.'

Maggy laughed. 'She earns her own living entirely. Entirely, sir!' said

Little Dorrit, in a lower and triumphant tone.

'Really does!'

'What is her history?' asked Clennam.

'Think of that, Maggy?' said Little Dorrit, taking her two large hands

and clapping them together. 'A gentleman from thousands of miles away,

wanting to know your history!'

'My history?' cried Maggy. 'Little mother.'

'She means me,' said Little Dorrit, rather confused; 'she is very much

attached to me. Her old grandmother was not so kind to her as she should

have been; was she, Maggy?' Maggy shook her head, made a drinking vessel

of her clenched left hand, drank out of it, and said, 'Gin.' Then beat

an imaginary child, and said, 'Broom-handles and pokers.'

'When Maggy was ten years old,' said Little Dorrit, watching her face

while she spoke, 'she had a bad fever, sir, and she has never grown any

older ever since.'

'Ten years old,' said Maggy, nodding her head. 'But what a nice

hospital! So comfortable, wasn't it? Oh so nice it was. Such a Ev'nly

place!'

'She had never been at peace before, sir,' said Little Dorrit, turning

towards Arthur for an instant and speaking low, 'and she always runs off

upon that.'

'Such beds there is there!' cried Maggy. 'Such lemonades! Such oranges!

Such d'licious broth and wine! Such Chicking! Oh, AIN'T it a delightful

place to go and stop at!'

'So Maggy stopped there as long as she could,' said Little Dorrit,

in her former tone of telling a child's story; the tone designed for

Maggy's ear, 'and at last, when she could stop there no longer, she came

out. Then, because she was never to be more than ten years old, however

long she lived--'

'However long she lived,' echoed Maggy.

'And because she was very weak; indeed was so weak that when she began

to laugh she couldn't stop herself--which was a great pity--'

(Maggy mighty grave of a sudden.)

'Her grandmother did not know what to do with her, and for some years

was very unkind to her indeed. At length, in course of time, Maggy began

to take pains to improve herself, and to be very attentive and very

industrious; and by degrees was allowed to come in and out as often as

she liked, and got enough to do to support herself, and does support

herself. And that,' said Little Dorrit, clapping the two great hands

together again, 'is Maggy's history, as Maggy knows!'

Ah! But Arthur would have known what was wanting to its completeness,

though he had never heard of the words Little mother; though he had

never seen the fondling of the small spare hand; though he had had no

sight for the tears now standing in the colourless eyes; though he had

had no hearing for the sob that checked the clumsy laugh. The dirty

gateway with the wind and rain whistling through it, and the basket of

muddy potatoes waiting to be spilt again or taken up, never seemed the

common hole it really was, when he looked back to it by these lights.

Never, never!

They were very near the end of their walk, and they now came out of the

gateway to finish it. Nothing would serve Maggy but that they must stop

at a grocer's window, short of their destination, for her to show her

learning. She could read after a sort; and picked out the fat figures in

the tickets of prices, for the most part correctly. She also stumbled,

with a large balance of success against her failures, through various

philanthropic recommendations to Try our Mixture, Try our Family Black,

Try our Orange-flavoured Pekoe, challenging competition at the head

of Flowery Teas; and various cautions to the public against spurious

establishments and adulterated articles. When he saw how pleasure

brought a rosy tint into Little Dorrit's face when Maggy made a hit,

he felt that he could have stood there making a library of the grocer's

window until the rain and wind were tired.

The court-yard received them at last, and there he said goodbye to

Little Dorrit. Little as she had always looked, she looked less than

ever when he saw her going into the Marshalsea lodge passage, the little

mother attended by her big child. The cage door opened, and when the

small bird, reared in captivity, had tamely fluttered in, he saw it shut

again; and then he came away.

CHAPTER 10. Containing the whole Science of Government

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told)

the most important Department under Government. No public business of

any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of

the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie,

and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the

plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express

authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had

been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody

would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had

been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks

of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical

correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one

sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country,

was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to

study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through

the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done,

the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments

in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it

invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted

on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public

departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of

all public departments and professional politicians all round the

Circumlocution Office. It is true that every new premier and every

new government, coming in because they had upheld a certain thing as

necessary to be done, were no sooner come in than they applied their

utmost faculties to discovering How not to do it. It is true that from

the moment when a general election was over, every returned man who had

been raving on hustings because it hadn't been done, and who had been

asking the friends of the honourable gentleman in the opposite interest

on pain of impeachment to tell him why it hadn't been done, and who had

been asserting that it must be done, and who had been pledging himself

that it should be done, began to devise, How it was not to be done. It

is true that the debates of both Houses of Parliament the whole session

through, uniformly tended to the protracted deliberation, How not to

do it. It is true that the royal speech at the opening of such session

virtually said, My lords and gentlemen, you have a considerable

stroke of work to do, and you will please to retire to your respective

chambers, and discuss, How not to do it. It is true that the royal

speech, at the close of such session, virtually said, My lords and

gentlemen, you have through several laborious months been considering

with great loyalty and patriotism, How not to do it, and you have found

out; and with the blessing of Providence upon the harvest (natural, not

political), I now dismiss you. All this is true, but the Circumlocution

Office went beyond it.

Because the Circumlocution Office went on mechanically, every day,

keeping this wonderful, all-sufficient wheel of statesmanship, How not

to do it, in motion. Because the Circumlocution Office was down upon any

ill-advised public servant who was going to do it, or who appeared to be

by any surprising accident in remote danger of doing it, with a minute,

and a memorandum, and a letter of instructions that extinguished him. It

was this spirit of national efficiency in the Circumlocution Office

that had gradually led to its having something to do with everything.

Mechanicians, natural philosophers, soldiers, sailors, petitioners,

memorialists, people with grievances, people who wanted to prevent

grievances, people who wanted to redress grievances, jobbing people,

jobbed people, people who couldn't get rewarded for merit, and people

who couldn't get punished for demerit, were all indiscriminately tucked

up under the foolscap paper of the Circumlocution Office.

Numbers of people were lost in the Circumlocution Office. Unfortunates

with wrongs, or with projects for the general welfare (and they had

better have had wrongs at first, than have taken that bitter English

recipe for certainly getting them), who in slow lapse of time and agony

had passed safely through other public departments; who, according to

rule, had been bullied in this, over-reached by that, and evaded by

the other; got referred at last to the Circumlocution Office, and

never reappeared in the light of day. Boards sat upon them, secretaries

minuted upon them, commissioners gabbled about them, clerks registered,

entered, checked, and ticked them off, and they melted away. In short,

all the business of the country went through the Circumlocution Office,

except the business that never came out of it; and its name was Legion.

Sometimes, angry spirits attacked the Circumlocution Office. Sometimes,

parliamentary questions were asked about it, and even parliamentary

motions made or threatened about it by demagogues so low and ignorant as

to hold that the real recipe of government was, How to do it. Then would

the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, in whose department it

was to defend the Circumlocution Office, put an orange in his pocket,

and make a regular field-day of the occasion. Then would he come down to

that house with a slap upon the table, and meet the honourable gentleman

foot to foot. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman

that the Circumlocution Office not only was blameless in this matter,

but was commendable in this matter, was extollable to the skies in this

matter. Then would he be there to tell that honourable gentleman that,

although the Circumlocution Office was invariably right and wholly

right, it never was so right as in this matter. Then would he be there

to tell that honourable gentleman that it would have been more to his

honour, more to his credit, more to his good taste, more to his good

sense, more to half the dictionary of commonplaces, if he had left the

Circumlocution Office alone, and never approached this matter. Then

would he keep one eye upon a coach or crammer from the Circumlocution

Office sitting below the bar, and smash the honourable gentleman with

the Circumlocution Office account of this matter. And although one

of two things always happened; namely, either that the Circumlocution

Office had nothing to say and said it, or that it had something to say

of which the noble lord, or right honourable gentleman, blundered one

half and forgot the other; the Circumlocution Office was always voted

immaculate by an accommodating majority.

Such a nursery of statesmen had the Department become in virtue of a

long career of this nature, that several solemn lords had attained the

reputation of being quite unearthly prodigies of business, solely from

having practised, How not to do it, as the head of the Circumlocution

Office. As to the minor priests and acolytes of that temple, the result

of all this was that they stood divided into two classes, and, down to

the junior messenger, either believed in the Circumlocution Office as

a heaven-born institution that had an absolute right to do whatever it

liked; or took refuge in total infidelity, and considered it a flagrant

nuisance.

The Barnacle family had for some time helped to administer the

Circumlocution Office. The Tite Barnacle Branch, indeed, considered

themselves in a general way as having vested rights in that direction,

and took it ill if any other family had much to say to it. The Barnacles

were a very high family, and a very large family. They were dispersed