top of his stool with exceeding gentleness. Witnessing these things,
the collegians would express an opinion that the turnkey, who was a
bachelor, had been cut out by nature for a family man. But the turnkey
thanked them, and said, 'No, on the whole it was enough to see other
people's children there.' At what period of her early life the little
creature began to perceive that it was not the habit of all the world to
live locked up in narrow yards surrounded by high walls with spikes at
the top, would be a difficult question to settle. But she was a very,
very little creature indeed, when she had somehow gained the knowledge
that her clasp of her father's hand was to be always loosened at the
door which the great key opened; and that while her own light steps were
free to pass beyond it, his feet must never cross that line. A pitiful
and plaintive look, with which she had begun to regard him when she was
still extremely young, was perhaps a part of this discovery.

With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything, indeed, but with
something in it for only him that was like protection, this Child of
the Marshalsea and the child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her
friend the turnkey in the lodge, kept the family room, or wandered about
the prison-yard, for the first eight years of her life. With a pitiful
and plaintive look for her wayward sister; for her idle brother; for the
high blank walls; for the faded crowd they shut in; for the games of the
prison children as they whooped and ran, and played at hide-and-seek,
and made the iron bars of the inner gateway 'Home.'

Wistful and wondering, she would sit in summer weather by the high
fender in the lodge, looking up at the sky through the barred window,
until, when she turned her eyes away, bars of light would arise between
her and her friend, and she would see him through a grating, too.
'Thinking of the fields,' the turnkey said once, after watching her,
'ain't you?'

'Where are they?' she inquired.

'Why, they're--over there, my dear,' said the turnkey, with a vague
flourish of his key. 'Just about there.'

'Does anybody open them, and shut them? Are they locked?'

The turnkey was discomfited. 'Well,' he said. 'Not in general.'

'Are they very pretty, Bob?' She called him Bob, by his own particular
request and instruction.

'Lovely. Full of flowers. There's buttercups, and there's daisies,
and there's'--the turnkey hesitated, being short of floral
nom