ive girl
leading her grey father, as if the sight reminded her of something in
the days that were gone.

Again, there would be places where they stayed the week together in
splendid rooms, had banquets every day, rode out among heaps of wonders,
walked through miles of palaces, and rested in dark corners of great
churches; where there were winking lamps of gold and silver among
pillars and arches, kneeling figures dotted about at confessionals and
on the pavements; where there was the mist and scent of incense; where
there were pictures, fantastic images, gaudy altars, great heights and
distances, all softly lighted through stained glass, and the massive
curtains that hung in the doorways. From these cities they would go on
again, by the roads of vines and olives, through squalid villages, where
there was not a hovel without a gap in its filthy walls, not a window
with a whole inch of glass or paper; where there seemed to be nothing to
support life, nothing to eat, nothing to make, nothing to grow, nothing
to hope, nothing to do but die.

Again they would come to whole towns of palaces, whose proper inmates
were all banished, and which were all changed into barracks: troops
of idle soldiers leaning out of the state windows, where their
accoutrements hung drying on the marble architecture, and showing to the
mind like hosts of rats who were (happily) eating away the props of the
edifices that supported them, and must soon, with them, be smashed on
the heads of the other swarms of soldiers and the swarms of priests, and
the swarms of spies, who were all the ill-looking population left to be
ruined, in the streets below.

Through such scenes, the family procession moved on to Venice. And here
it dispersed for a time, as they were to live in Venice some few months
in a palace (itself six times as big as the whole Marshalsea) on the
Grand Canal.

In this crowning unreality, where all the streets were paved with water,
and where the deathlike stillness of the days and nights was broken by
no sound but the softened ringing of church-bells, the rippling of
the current, and the cry of the gondoliers turning the corners of the
flowing streets, Little Dorrit, quite lost by her task being done, sat
down to muse. The family began a gay life, went here and there, and
turned night into day; but she was timid of joining in their gaieties,
and only asked leave to be left alone.

Sometimes she would step into one of the gondolas th