'Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.' 'Chaymaid!' cried the waiter. 'Gelen box num seven wish see room!' 'Stay!' said Clennam, rousing himself. 'I was not thinking of what I

said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going

home.'

'Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome.'

He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses

opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants

were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old

places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy

glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen

enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to

fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began

to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out

hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet

umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had

been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say?

But it seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to

have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was

going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch,

one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce

any show of brightness into such a dismal scene.

Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked out.

In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents,

and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful

form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale

smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to

the gutters.

He crossed by St Paul's and went down, at a long angle, almost to the

water's edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which

lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and

Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful

Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that

seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and

discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here

and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little

bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the

house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black,

standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard

where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying

much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it,

a jumble of roots.




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