e supposed him to live by his wits at
play-tables and the like; though he suspected him to be a coward, while
he himself was daring and courageous; though he thoroughly knew him to
be disliked by Minnie; and though he cared so little for him, after all,
that if he had given her any tangible personal cause to regard him with
aversion, he would have had no compunction whatever in flinging him out
of the highest window in Venice into the deepest water of the city.

Little Dorrit would have been glad to make her visit to Mrs Gowan,
alone; but as Fanny, who had not yet recovered from her Uncle's protest,
though it was four-and-twenty hours of age, pressingly offered her
company, the two sisters stepped together into one of the gondolas under
Mr Dorrit's window, and, with the courier in attendance, were taken in
high state to Mrs Gowan's lodging. In truth, their state was rather too
high for the lodging, which was, as Fanny complained, 'fearfully out of
the way,' and which took them through a complexity of narrow streets of
water, which the same lady disparaged as 'mere ditches.'

The house, on a little desert island, looked as if it had broken
away from somewhere else, and had floated by chance into its present
anchorage in company with a vine almost as much in want of training as
the poor wretches who were lying under its leaves. The features of the
surrounding picture were, a church with hoarding and scaffolding about
it, which had been under suppositious repair so long that the means of
repair looked a hundred years old, and had themselves fallen into decay;
a quantity of washed linen, spread to dry in the sun; a number of houses
at odds with one another and grotesquely out of the perpendicular, like
rotten pre-Adamite cheeses cut into fantastic shapes and full of mites;
and a feverish bewilderment of windows, with their lattice-blinds all
hanging askew, and something draggled and dirty dangling out of most of
them.

On the first-floor of the house was a Bank--a surprising experience for
any gentleman of commercial pursuits bringing laws for all mankind from
a British city--where two spare clerks, like dried dragoons, in green
velvet caps adorned with golden tassels, stood, bearded, behind a small
counter in a small room, containing no other visible objects than an
empty iron-safe with the door open, a jug of water, and a papering of
garland of roses; but who, on lawful requisition, by merely dipping
their hands out of