rected. One Sunday night I remonstrated with my father on this head,
so pathetically, and with so many tears, that his kind nature gave way.
He began to think that it was not quite right. I do believe he had
never thought so before, or thought about it. It was the first
remonstrance I had ever made about my lot, and perhaps it opened up a
little more than I intended. A back-attic was found for me at the house
of an insolvent-court agent, who lived in Lant Street in the borough,
where Bob Sawyer lodged many years afterwards. A bed and bedding were
sent over for me, and made up on the floor. The little window had a
pleasant prospect of a timber-yard; and when I took possession of my new
abode I thought it was a Paradise."

There is here another blank, which it is, however, not difficult to
supply from letters and recollections of my own. What was to him of
course the great pleasure of his paradise of a lodging was its bringing
him again, though after a fashion sorry enough, within the circle of
home. From this time he used to breakfast "at home,"--in other words, in
the Marshalsea; going to it as early as the gates were open, and for the
most part much earlier. They had no want of bodily comforts there. His
father's income, still going on, was amply sufficient for that; and in
every respect indeed but elbow-room, I have heard him say, the family
lived more comfortably in prison than they had done for a long time out
of it. They were waited on still by the maid-of-all-work from Bayham
Street, the orphan girl of the Chatham workhouse, from whose sharp
little worldly and also kindly ways he took his first impression of the
Marchioness in the _Old Curiosity Shop_. She also had a lodging in the
neighborhood, that she might be early on the scene of her duties; and
when Charles met her, as he would do occasionally, in his lounging-place
by London Bridge, he would occupy the time before the gates opened by
telling her quite astonishing fictions about the wharves and the tower.
"But I hope I believed them myself," he would say. Besides breakfast, he
had supper also in the prison, and got to his lodging generally at nine
o'clock. The gates closed always at ten.

I must not omit what he told me of the landlord of this little lodging.
He was a fat, good-natured, kind old gentleman. He was lame, and had a
quiet old wife; and he had a very innocent grown-up son, who was lame
too. They were all very kind to the boy. He was taken with on