like this?' said the
doctor. 'Bah, bah, sir, what does it signify? A little more elbow-room
is all we want here. We are quiet here; we don't get badgered here;
there's no knocker here, sir, to be hammered at by creditors and bring a
man's heart into his mouth. Nobody comes here to ask if a man's at
home, and to say he'll stand on the door mat till he is. Nobody writes
threatening letters about money to this place. It's freedom, sir, it's
freedom! I have had to-day's practice at home and abroad, on a march,
and aboard ship, and I'll tell you this: I don't know that I have ever
pursued it under such quiet circumstances as here this day. Elsewhere,
people are restless, worried, hurried about, anxious respecting one
thing, anxious respecting another. Nothing of the kind here, sir. We
have done all that--we know the worst of it; we have got to the bottom,
we can't fall, and what have we found? Peace. That's the word for
it. Peace.' With this profession of faith, the doctor, who was an old
jail-bird, and was more sodden than usual, and had the additional and
unusual stimulus of money in his pocket, returned to his associate and
chum in hoarseness, puffiness, red-facedness, all-fours, tobacco, dirt,
and brandy.

Now, the debtor was a very different man from the doctor, but he had
already begun to travel, by his opposite segment of the circle, to the
same point. Crushed at first by his imprisonment, he had soon found a
dull relief in it. He was under lock and key; but the lock and key that
kept him in, kept numbers of his troubles out. If he had been a man with
strength of purpose to face those troubles and fight them, he might have
broken the net that held him, or broken his heart; but being what he
was, he languidly slipped into this smooth descent, and never more took
one step upward.

When he was relieved of the perplexed affairs that nothing would make
plain, through having them returned upon his hands by a dozen agents in
succession who could make neither beginning, middle, nor end of them or
him, he found his miserable place of refuge a quieter refuge than it
had been before. He had unpacked the portmanteau long ago; and his elder
children now played regularly about the yard, and everybody knew the
baby, and claimed a kind of proprietorship in her.

'Why, I'm getting proud of you,' said his friend the turnkey, one day.
'You'll be the oldest inhabitant soon. The Marshalsea wouldn't be like
the Marshalsea now, without y