mer day, and my spirits may
have been oppressed by the hot exhausted air, and by the dust and grit
that lay thick on everything. But I sat wondering and waiting in Mr.
Jaggers's close room, until I really could not bear the two casts on the
shelf above Mr. Jaggers's chair, and got up and went out.

When I told the clerk that I would take a turn in the air while I
waited, he advised me to go round the corner and I should come into
Smithfield. So I came into Smithfield; and the shameful place, being all
asmear with filth and fat and blood and foam, seemed to stick to me. So,
I rubbed it off with all possible speed by turning into a street where
I saw the great black dome of Saint Paul's bulging at me from behind a
grim stone building which a bystander said was Newgate Prison. Following
the wall of the jail, I found the roadway covered with straw to deaden
the noise of passing vehicles; and from this, and from the quantity of
people standing about smelling strongly of spirits and beer, I inferred
that the trials were on.

While I looked about me here, an exceedingly dirty and partially drunk
minister of justice asked me if I would like to step in and hear a
trial or so: informing me that he could give me a front place for half a
crown, whence I should command a full view of the Lord Chief Justice in
his wig and robes,--mentioning that awful personage like waxwork, and
presently offering him at the reduced price of eighteen-pence. As I
declined the proposal on the plea of an appointment, he was so good as
to take me into a yard and show me where the gallows was kept, and also
where people were publicly whipped, and then he showed me the Debtors'
Door, out of which culprits came to be hanged; heightening the interest
of that dreadful portal by giving me to understand that "four on 'em"
would come out at that door the day after to-morrow at eight in the
morning, to be killed in a row. This was horrible, and gave me a
sickening idea of London; the more so as the Lord Chief Justice's
proprietor wore (from his hat down to his boots and up again to his
pocket-handkerchief inclusive) mildewed clothes which had evidently
not belonged to him originally, and which I took it into my head he had
bought cheap of the executioner. Under these circumstances I thought
myself well rid of him for a shilling.

I dropped into the office to ask if Mr. Jaggers had come in yet, and I
found he had not, and I strolled out again. This time, I made