sat down upon
a stool and ate as ravenously as though he had not tasted food for
months. Meanwhile the tall man at the head of the table talked solemnly
to his wife at the other end, using strange long words which none of the
children could understand.

Supper over Mr. and Mrs. Dickens (for that was their name) and the two
younger children sat before the tiny fire, and Mr. Dickens talked of how
he might raise enough money to pay his debts, leave the prison, and
start fresh in some new business. Charles had heard these same plans
from his father's lips a thousand times before, and so he took from the
cupboard an old book which he had bought at a little second-hand shop a
few days before, a small tattered copy of "Don Quixote," and read it by
the light of a tallow candle in the corner.

The lines soon blurred before the boy's tired eyes, his head nodded, and
he was fast asleep. He was awakened by his father's deep voice. "Time
to be leaving, Charles, my son. You have not forgotten that my pecuniary
situation prevents my choosing the hour at which I shall close the door
of my house. Fortunately it is a predicament which I trust will soon be
obviated to our mutual satisfaction."

The small fellow stood up, shook hands solemnly with his father, kissed
his mother, and took his way out of the great prison. Open doors on
various landings gave him pictures of many queer households; sometimes
he would stop as though to consider some unusually puzzling face or
figure.

Into the night again he went, and wound through a dismal labyrinth of
the dark and narrow streets of old London. Sometimes a rough voice or an
evil face would frighten him, and he would take to his heels and run as
fast as he could. When he passed the house where he had asked for Mr.
Fagin he chuckled to himself; he would not have had his friend know for
worlds that his family's home was the Marshalsea Prison.

Even that room in the prison, however, was more cheerful than the small
back-attic chamber where the boy fell asleep for the second time that
night. He slept on a bed made up on the floor, but his slumber was no
less deep on that account.

The noise of workmen in a timber yard under his window woke Charles when
it seemed much too dark to be morning. It was morning, however, and he
was quickly dressed, and making his breakfast from the penny cottage
loaf of bread, section of cream cheese and small bottle of milk, which
were all he could afford to buy fr