Vol.1 f.057 recto

[???? ????? of you, and His] son began to supersede Mrs Flinx [Bangham], and to go of ???? execute commissions in a knowing manner, and
to be of the prison prisonous, of the streets streety.
Time went on, and the turnkey began to fail. His nose ??????? chest swelled, and his legs got weak, and he was short of breath. The well-
worn wooden stool was “beyond him,” he said. complained. He sat in an arm-chair with a
cushion, and sometimes wheezed so, for minutes together, that he couldn’t turn the key. When he was overpowered by these fits [?????????], the debtor often
turned it for him.

Why you “You and me,” said the turnkey, one snowy winter’s [???] night when the lodge, with a
bright fire in it, was pretty full of company; "you and me are is the oldest inhabitants of the Marshalsea.
I wasn’t here above seven myself, above seven year [???] before you. I shan’t last long. When I’m off the lock for
good and all, you’ll be the Father of the Marshalsea.”

The turnkey died [went off the lock of ?? ] went off the lock of [??????????] this world next day. His words were remembered and repeated; and tradition
afterwards handed down from generation to generation—a Marshalsea generation might be calculated
on the average at as about three months—that the shabby old debtor with the soft manner and the white hair, [???????] was the
Father of the Marshalsea.

And the And he he grew to be proud of the title. If any impostor had [????] arisen to claim it, he
would have opposed that man to the death shed tears in resentment of the attempt to
deprive him of his rights. There was a A disposition began to be perceived in him to exaggerate the number of years
he had been there; it was generally understood that you must deduct a few from his account; he was vain,
the fleeting generations of debtors said.

All new-comers were presented to him. It was a ceremony He was punctilious in the exaction of this ceremony. The wits
would perform the office of introduction with overcharged pomp and politeness, but they could
not easily overstep his sense of its gravity. He received them in his poor room (he disliked
an introduction in the mere yard, as informal—a thing that might happen to anybody), with a kind of
bowed-down beneficence. They were welcome to the Marshalsea, he would tell them. Yes, he was the Father of
the place. So the [??? they were good] world was kind enough to call him; and so in point of fact he was, if more than twenty years of residence
gave him a claim to the title. It looked small at first, but there was very good company there—among
a mixture—necessarily a mixture—and very good air.

It became a not unusual circumstance for letters [??? and ???] to be put under his
door at night, enclosing half a crown, two half crowns, now and then at long [????] intervals even half a
sovereign, "For the Father of the Marshalsea. With the compliments of a collegian taking leave.” He received
the gifts generally as tributes from as tributes from admirers, to a public character. [His ???] Some-
times these correspondents assumed fantastic titles facetious names, as the Brick, The Knife [????] Bellows,
[Young Sons ?] Old Gooseberry, [???] Wideawake, [?????] Snooks, Mops, [???] Cutaway, [???] boots
the Dogs-meat Man but he considered this in bad taste, and was always a little hurt by it.

In the fulness of time these letters this brand of correspondence not ??? keeping pace with
his [???] [???????] showing signs of wearing out and requiring an seeming to require an effort and an [???] of decisions on the part of the correspondents to which in
the hurried circumstances of departure many of them might not be equal, he established the custom of
attending collegians [????] of a certain standing, to the gate, and taking leave of them there.
The collegian [???] under treatment, after taking leave after shaking hands, would sometimes occasionally stop to wrap up something in a
bit of paper, after taking leave and would call after come back again, calling “Hi!”

He would look back round surprised. “Me?” he would say, with a smile.