ck Bamber out; he was never heard
to talk about anything else but the inns, and he has lived alone in them
till he's half crazy.'

The individual to whom Lowten alluded, was a little, yellow,
high-shouldered man, whose countenance, from his habit of stooping
forward when silent, Mr. Pickwick had not observed before. He wondered,
though, when the old man raised his shrivelled face, and bent his gray
eye upon him, with a keen inquiring look, that such remarkable features
could have escaped his attention for a moment. There was a fixed grim
smile perpetually on his countenance; he leaned his chin on a long,
skinny hand, with nails of extraordinary length; and as he inclined his
head to one side, and looked keenly out from beneath his ragged gray
eyebrows, there was a strange, wild slyness in his leer, quite repulsive
to behold.

This was the figure that now started forward, and burst into an animated
torrent of words. As this chapter has been a long one, however, and as
the old man was a remarkable personage, it will be more respectful to
him, and more convenient to us, to let him speak for himself in a fresh
one.

CHAPTER XXI. IN WHICH THE OLD MAN LAUNCHES FORTH INTO HIS FAVOURITE
THEME, AND RELATES A STORY ABOUT A QUEER CLIENT

Aha!' said the old man, a brief description of whose manner and
appearance concluded the last chapter, 'aha! who was talking about the
inns?'

'I was, Sir,' replied Mr. Pickwick--'I was observing what singular old
places they are.'

'YOU!' said the old man contemptuously. 'What do YOU know of the time
when young men shut themselves up in those lonely rooms, and read and
read, hour after hour, and night after night, till their reason wandered
beneath their midnight studies; till their mental powers were exhausted;
till morning's light brought no freshness or health to them; and they
sank beneath the unnatural devotion of their youthful energies to their
dry old books? Coming down to a later time, and a very different day,
what do YOU know of the gradual sinking beneath consumption, or
the quick wasting of fever--the grand results of "life" and
dissipation--which men have undergone in these same rooms? How many vain
pleaders for mercy, do you think, have turned away heart-sick from the
lawyer's office, to find a resting-place in the Thames, or a refuge in
the jail? They are no ordinary houses, those. There is not a panel in
the old wainscotting, but what, if it were endowed with the po