my father, and was going back to the borough over Westminster
Bridge), that I went into a public-house in Parliament Street,--which is
still there, though altered,--at the corner of the short street leading
into Cannon Row, and said to the landlord behind the bar, 'What is your
very best--the VERY _best_--ale, a glass?' For the occasion was a
festive one, for some reason: I forget why. It may have been my
birthday, or somebody else's. 'Two-pence,' says he. 'Then,' says I,
'just draw me a glass of that, if you please, with a good head to it.'
The landlord looked at me, in return, over the bar, from head to foot,
with a strange smile on his face, and, instead of drawing the beer,
looked round the screen and said something to his wife, who came out
from behind it, with her work in her hand, and joined him in surveying
me. Here we stand, all three, before me now, in my study in Devonshire
Terrace. The landlord, in his shirt-sleeves, leaning against the bar
window-frame; his wife, looking over the little half-door; and I, in
some confusion, looking up at them from outside the partition. They
asked me a good many questions, as what my name was, how old I was,
where I lived, how I was employed, etc. etc. To all of which, that I
might commit nobody, I invented appropriate answers. They served me with
the ale, though I suspect it was not the strongest on the premises; and
the landlord's wife, opening the little half-door and bending down, gave
me a kiss that was half admiring and half compassionate, but all womanly
and good, I am sure."

A later, and not less characteristic, incident of the true story of this
time found also a place, three or four years after it was written, in
his now famous fiction. It preceded but by a short time the discharge,
from the Marshalsea, of the elder Dickens; to whom a rather considerable
legacy from a relative had accrued not long before ("some hundreds," I
understood), and had been paid into court during his imprisonment. The
scene to be described arose on the occasion of a petition drawn up by
him before he left, praying, not for the abolition of imprisonment for
debt, as David Copperfield relates, but for the less dignified but more
accessible boon of a bounty to the prisoners to drink his majesty's
health on his majesty's forthcoming birthday.

"I mention the circumstance because it illustrates, to me, my early
interest in observing people. When I went to the Marshalsea of a night,
I was alw