"Not at all," returned the ancient clerk.
"Speak well of the law. Take care of your
chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the
law to take care of itself. I give you that
advice."

"It's the damp, sir, what settles on my chest
and voice," said Jerry. "I leave you to
judge what a damp way of earning a living
mine is."

"Well, well," said the old clerk; "we all
have our various ways of gaining a livelihood.
Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have
dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along."

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to
himself with less internal deference than he
made an outward show of, "You are a lean
old one, too," made his bow, informed his
son, in passing, of his destination, and went
his way.

They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the
street outside Newgate had not obtained one
infamous notoriety that has since attached to it.
But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most
kinds of debauchery and villany were practised,
and where dire diseases were bred, that came
into court with the prisoners, and sometimes
rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief
Justice himself, and pulled him off the bench.
It had more than once happened, that the judge
in the black cap pronounced his own doom as
certainly as the prisoner's, and even died before
him. For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous
as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale
travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches,
on a violent passage into the other world:
traversing some two miles and a half of public
street and road, and shaming few good citizens,
if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to
be good use in the beginning. It was famous,
too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that
inflicted a punishment of which no one could
foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post,
another dear old institution, very humanising
and softening to behold in action; also, for
extensive transactions in blood-money, another
fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically
leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes
that could be committed under Heaven.
Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice
illustration of the precept, that "Whatever is
is right;" an aphorism that would be as final as
it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome
consequence, that nothing that ever was, was
wrong.

Making his way through the tainted crowd,
dispersed up and down this hideous scene of
action, with the skill of a man accustomed to
make his way quietly, the messenger found out
the door he sought, and handed in his letter
through a trap in it. For, people then paid to
see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid
to see the play in Bedlam—only the former
entertainment was much the dearer. Therefore,
all the Old Bailey doors were well guarded—
except, indeed, the social doors by which the
criminals got there, and they were always left
wide open.

After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly
turned on its hinges a very little way, and
allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to squeeze himself
into court.

"What's on?" he asked, in a whisper, of the
man he found himself next to.

"Nothing yet."

"What's coming on?"

"The Treason case."

"The quartering one, eh?"

"Ah!" returned the man, with a relish; "he'll
be drawn on a hurdle to be half hanged, and
then he'll be taken down and sliced before his
own face, and then his inside will be taken out
and burnt while he looks on, and then his head
will be chopped off, and he'll be cut into
quarters. That's the sentence."

"If he's found Guilty, you mean to say?"
Jerry added, by way of proviso.

"Oh! they'll find him Guilty," said the other.
Don't you be afraid of that."

Mr. Cruncher's attention was here diverted
to the doorkeeper, whom he saw making his
way to Mr. Lorry, with the note in his hand.
Mr. Lorry sat at a table, among the gentlemen
in wigs: not far from a wigged gentleman, the
prisoner's counsel, who had a great bundle of
papers before him: and nearly opposite another
wigged gentleman with his hands in his pockets,
whose whole attention, when Mr. Cruncher
looked at him then or afterwards, seemed to be
concentrated on the ceiling of the court. After
some gruff coughing and rubbing of his chin
and signing with his hand, Jerry attracted the
notice of Mr. Lorry, who had stood up to look
for him, and who quietly nodded, and sat down
again.

"What's he got to do with the case?" asked
the man he had spoken with.

"Blest if I know," said Jerry.

"What have you got to do with it, then, if
a person may inquire?"

"Blest if I know that, either," said Jerry.

The entrance of the Judge, and a consequent
great stir and settling-down in the court,
stopped the dialogue. Presently, the clock
became the central point of interest. Two
gaolers, who had been standing there, went
out, and the prisoner was brought in, and put
to the bar.

Everybody present, except the one wigged
gentleman who looked at the ceiling, stared at
him. All the human breath in the place, rolled at
him, like a sea, or a wind, or a fire. Eager faces
strained round pillars and corners, to get a sight
of him; spectators in back rows stood up, not
to miss a hair of him; people on the floor of
the court, laid their hands on the shoulders of
the people before them, to help themselves, at
anybody's cost, to a view of him—stood a-tiptoe,
got upon ledges, stood upon next to nothing,
to see every inch of him. Conspicuous
among these latter, like an animated bit of the
spiked wall of Newgate, Jerry stood: aiming
at the prisoner the beery breath of a whet he
had taken as he came along, and discharging
it to mingle with the waves of other beer, and