allenging competition at the head
of Flowery Teas; and various cautions to the public against spurious
establishments and adulterated articles. When he saw how pleasure
brought a rosy tint into Little Dorrit's face when Maggy made a hit,
he felt that he could have stood there making a library of the grocer's
window until the rain and wind were tired.

The court-yard received them at last, and there he said goodbye to
Little Dorrit. Little as she had always looked, she looked less than
ever when he saw her going into the Marshalsea lodge passage, the little
mother attended by her big child. The cage door opened, and when the
small bird, reared in captivity, had tamely fluttered in, he saw it shut
again; and then he came away.

CHAPTER 10. Containing the whole Science of Government

The Circumlocution Office was (as everybody knows without being told)
the most important Department under Government. No public business of
any kind could possibly be done at any time without the acquiescence of
the Circumlocution Office. Its finger was in the largest public pie,
and in the smallest public tart. It was equally impossible to do the
plainest right and to undo the plainest wrong without the express
authority of the Circumlocution Office. If another Gunpowder Plot had
been discovered half an hour before the lighting of the match, nobody
would have been justified in saving the parliament until there had
been half a score of boards, half a bushel of minutes, several sacks
of official memoranda, and a family-vault full of ungrammatical
correspondence, on the part of the Circumlocution Office.

This glorious establishment had been early in the field, when the one
sublime principle involving the difficult art of governing a country,
was first distinctly revealed to statesmen. It had been foremost to
study that bright revelation and to carry its shining influence through
the whole of the official proceedings. Whatever was required to be done,
the Circumlocution Office was beforehand with all the public departments
in the art of perceiving--HOW NOT TO DO IT.

Through this delicate perception, through the tact with which it
invariably seized it, and through the genius with which it always acted
on it, the Circumlocution Office had risen to overtop all the public
departments; and the public condition had risen to be--what it was.

It is true that How not to do it was the great study and object of
all public departments and pr