Little Dorrit Vol.1 f.032 recto

draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had been doing with itself or where it came from, who
could say? But it collected seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and where splashed in [??] five
minutes where splashed all [???????] the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was
going his rounds now; and and as [???? ???? ?????????e?pl????????the???? t???s?f] the fiery jets [????????] sprang up under [???]
his touch, one might have appeared 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. It was a double house, with long, narrow, heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds, appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance.

“Nothing changed,” said the traveller, stopping to look round. “Dark and miserable as ever. A light in my mother’s window, which seems never to have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and dragged my box over this pavement. Well, well, well!”

He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work of festooned jack-towels and children’s heads with water on the brain, designed after a once-popular monumental pattern, and knocked. A shuffling step was soon heard on the stone floor of the hall, and the door was opened by an old man, bent and dried, but with keen eyes.

He had a candle in his hand, and he held it up for a moment to assist his keen eyes. “Ah, Mr Arthur?” he said, without any emotion, “you are come at last? Step in.”

Mr Arthur stepped in and shut the door.

“Your figure is filled out, and set,” said the old man, turning to look at him with the light
raised again and shaking his head; “but you don’t come up ?your father in my opinion. Nor yet your mother.”