on the top story but one), and cried very much. And he told me, I
remember, to take warning by the Marshalsea, and to observe that if a
man had twenty pounds a year and spent nineteen pounds nineteen
shillings and sixpence, he would be happy; but that a shilling spent the
other way would make him wretched. I see the fire we sat before, now;
with two bricks inside the rusted grate, one on each side, to prevent
its burning too many coals. Some other debtor shared the room with him,
who came in by-and-by; and, as the dinner was a joint-stock repast, I
was sent up to 'Captain Porter' in the room overhead, with Mr. Dickens's
compliments, and I was his son, and could he, Captain P., lend me a
knife and fork?

"Captain Porter lent the knife and fork, with his compliments in return.
There was a very dirty lady in his little room; and two wan girls, his
daughters, with shock heads of hair. I thought I should not have liked
to borrow Captain Porter's comb. The captain himself was in the last
extremity of shabbiness; and if I could draw at all, I would draw an
accurate portrait of the old, old, brown great-coat he wore, with no
other coat below it. His whiskers were large. I saw his bed rolled up in
a corner; and what plates, and dishes, and pots he had, on a shelf; and
I knew (God knows how) that the two girls with the shock heads were
Captain Porter's natural children, and that the dirty lady was not
married to Captain P. My timid, wondering station on his threshold was
not occupied more than a couple of minutes, I dare say; but I came down
again to the room below with all this as surely in my knowledge as the
knife and fork were in my hand."

How there was something agreeable and gipsy-like in the dinner after
all, and how he took back the captain's knife and fork early in the
afternoon, and how he went home to comfort his mother with an account of
his visit, David Copperfield has also accurately told. Then, at home,
came many miserable daily struggles that seemed to last an immense time,
yet did not perhaps cover many weeks. Almost everything by degrees was
sold or pawned, little Charles being the principal agent in those
sorrowful transactions. Such of the books as had been brought from
Chatham--_Peregrine Pickle_, _Roderick Random_, _Tom Jones_, _Humphrey
Clinker_, and all the rest--went first. They were carried off from the
little chiffonier, which his father called the library, to a bookseller
in the Hampstead Road, the s