person. It commanded from a similar point of sight
another angle of the wall, and another side of the cistern. 'Not the
damp side,' said Mrs Todgers. 'THAT is Mr Jinkins's.'

In the first of these sanctuaries a fire was speedily kindled by the
youthful porter, who, whistling at his work in the absence of Mrs
Todgers (not to mention his sketching figures on his corduroys with
burnt firewood), and being afterwards taken by that lady in the fact,
was dismissed with a box on his ears. Having prepared breakfast for the
young ladies with her own hands, she withdrew to preside in the other
room; where the joke at Mr Jinkins's expense seemed to be proceeding
rather noisily.

'I won't ask you yet, my dears,' said Mr Pecksniff, looking in at the
door, 'how you like London. Shall I?'

'We haven't seen much of it, Pa!' cried Merry.

'Nothing, I hope,' said Cherry. (Both very miserably.)

'Indeed,' said Mr Pecksniff, 'that's true. We have our pleasure, and our
business too, before us. All in good time. All in good time!'

Whether Mr Pecksniff's business in London was as strictly professional
as he had given his new pupil to understand, we shall see, to adopt that
worthy man's phraseology, 'all in good time.'

CHAPTER NINE

TOWN AND TODGER'S

Surely there never was, in any other borough, city, or hamlet in the
world, such a singular sort of a place as Todgers's. And surely London,
to judge from that part of it which hemmed Todgers's round and hustled
it, and crushed it, and stuck its brick-and-mortar elbows into it, and
kept the air from it, and stood perpetually between it and the
light, was worthy of Todgers's, and qualified to be on terms of close
relationship and alliance with hundreds and thousands of the odd family
to which Todgers's belonged.

You couldn't walk about Todgers's neighbourhood, as you could in any
other neighbourhood. You groped your way for an hour through lanes and
byways, and court-yards, and passages; and you never once emerged upon
anything that might be reasonably called a street. A kind of resigned
distraction came over the stranger as he trod those devious mazes, and,
giving himself up for lost, went in and out and round about and quietly
turned back again when he came to a dead wall or was stopped by an
iron railing, and felt that the means of escape might possibly present
themselves in their own good time, but that to anticipate them was
hopeless. Instances were known of people who, be