embling lip on every such occasion, and the sharpest practitioners
gave him up as a hopeless job.

'Out?' said the turnkey, 'he'll never get out, unless his creditors take
him by the shoulders and shove him out.'

He had been there five or six months, when he came running to this
turnkey one forenoon to tell him, breathless and pale, that his wife was
ill.

'As anybody might a known she would be,' said the turnkey.

'We intended,' he returned, 'that she should go to a country lodging
only to-morrow. What am I to do! Oh, good heaven, what am I to do!'

'Don't waste your time in clasping your hands and biting your fingers,'
responded the practical turnkey, taking him by the elbow, 'but come
along with me.'

The turnkey conducted him--trembling from head to foot, and constantly
crying under his breath, What was he to do! while his irresolute fingers
bedabbled the tears upon his face--up one of the common staircases in
the prison to a door on the garret story. Upon which door the turnkey
knocked with the handle of his key.

'Come in!' cried a voice inside.

The turnkey, opening the door, disclosed in a wretched, ill-smelling
little room, two hoarse, puffy, red-faced personages seated at a
rickety table, playing at all-fours, smoking pipes, and drinking brandy.
'Doctor,' said the turnkey, 'here's a gentleman's wife in want of you
without a minute's loss of time!'

The doctor's friend was in the positive degree of hoarseness, puffiness,
red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt, and brandy; the doctor in
the comparative--hoarser, puffier, more red-faced, more all-fourey,
tobaccoer, dirtier, and brandier. The doctor was amazingly shabby, in
a torn and darned rough-weather sea-jacket, out at elbows and eminently
short of buttons (he had been in his time the experienced surgeon
carried by a passenger ship), the dirtiest white trousers conceivable by
mortal man, carpet slippers, and no visible linen. 'Childbed?' said
the doctor. 'I'm the boy!' With that the doctor took a comb from the
chimney-piece and stuck his hair upright--which appeared to be his
way of washing himself--produced a professional chest or case, of most
abject appearance, from the cupboard where his cup and saucer and coals
were, settled his chin in the frowsy wrapper round his neck, and became
a ghastly medical scarecrow.

The doctor and the debtor ran down-stairs, leaving the turnkey to return
to the lock, and made for the debtor's room. All the ladie