Great Expectations

Turning from the Temple gate as soon as I had read the warning, I made

the best of my way to Fleet Street, and there got a late hackney chariot

and drove to the Hummums in Covent Garden. In those times a bed was

always to be got there at any hour of the night, and the chamberlain,

letting me in at his ready wicket, lighted the candle next in order on

his shelf, and showed me straight into the bedroom next in order on his

list. It was a sort of vault on the ground floor at the back, with a

despotic monster of a four-post bedstead in it, straddling over the

whole place, putting one of his arbitrary legs into the fireplace

and another into the doorway, and squeezing the wretched little

washing-stand in quite a Divinely Righteous manner.

As I had asked for a night-light, the chamberlain had brought me in,

before he left me, the good old constitutional rushlight of those

virtuous days.--an object like the ghost of a walking-cane, which

instantly broke its back if it were touched, which nothing could ever be

lighted at, and which was placed in solitary confinement at the bottom

of a high tin tower, perforated with round holes that made a staringly

wide-awake pattern on the walls. When I had got into bed, and lay there

footsore, weary, and wretched, I found that I could no more close my own

eyes than I could close the eyes of this foolish Argus. And thus, in the

gloom and death of the night, we stared at one another.

What a doleful night! How anxious, how dismal, how long! There was an

inhospitable smell in the room, of cold soot and hot dust; and, as I

looked up into the corners of the tester over my head, I thought what

a number of blue-bottle flies from the butchers', and earwigs from the

market, and grubs from the country, must be holding on up there, lying

by for next summer. This led me to speculate whether any of them ever

tumbled down, and then I fancied that I felt light falls on my face,--a

disagreeable turn of thought, suggesting other and more objectionable

approaches up my back. When I had lain awake a little while, those

extraordinary voices with which silence teems began to make themselves

audible. The closet whispered, the fireplace sighed, the little

washing-stand ticked, and one guitar-string played occasionally in the

chest of drawers. At about the same time, the eyes on the wall acquired

a new expression, and in every one of those staring rounds I saw

written, DON'T GO HOME.