ite a
letter to the papers and show the marshal up, he fell into miscellaneous
conversation with the rest. It was evident from the general tone of the
whole party, that they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state
of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally
broke out. In this strange scene, and with these strange spectres
flitting about him, Arthur Clennam looked on at the preparations as if
they were part of a dream. Pending which, the long-initiated Tip, with
an awful enjoyment of the Snuggery's resources, pointed out the common
kitchen fire maintained by subscription of collegians, the boiler for
hot water supported in like manner, and other premises generally tending
to the deduction that the way to be healthy, wealthy, and wise, was to
come to the Marshalsea.

The two tables put together in a corner, were, at length, converted into
a very fair bed; and the stranger was left to the Windsor chairs,
the presidential tribune, the beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipe-lights,
spittoons and repose. But the last item was long, long, long, in linking
itself to the rest. The novelty of the place, the coming upon it without
preparation, the sense of being locked up, the remembrance of that room
up-stairs, of the two brothers, and above all of the retiring childish
form, and the face in which he now saw years of insufficient food, if
not of want, kept him waking and unhappy.

Speculations, too, bearing the strangest relations towards the prison,
but always concerning the prison, ran like nightmares through his mind
while he lay awake. Whether coffins were kept ready for people who might
die there, where they were kept, how they were kept, where people who
died in the prison were buried, how they were taken out, what forms were
observed, whether an implacable creditor could arrest the dead? As to
escaping, what chances there were of escape? Whether a prisoner could
scale the walls with a cord and grapple, how he would descend upon
the other side? whether he could alight on a housetop, steal down a
staircase, let himself out at a door, and get lost in the crowd? As to
Fire in the prison, if one were to break out while he lay there?

And these involuntary starts of fancy were, after all, but the setting
of a picture in which three people kept before him. His father, with the
steadfast look with which he had died, prophetically darkened forth in
the portrait; his mother, with her arm up, warding off