Mr Merdle's pocket.
Ferdinand Barnacle laughed in his easy way, and airily said they were
a nice set of fellows. Bishop, mentally perambulating among paths of
peace, was altogether swallowed up in absence of mind.

'Pray,' asked Lord Decimus, casting his eyes around the table, 'what
is this story I have heard of a gentleman long confined in a debtors'
prison proving to be of a wealthy family, and having come into the
inheritance of a large sum of money? I have met with a variety of
allusions to it. Do you know anything of it, Ferdinand?'

'I only know this much,' said Ferdinand, 'that he has given the
Department with which I have the honour to be associated;' this
sparkling young Barnacle threw off the phrase sportively, as who should
say, We know all about these forms of speech, but we must keep it up,
we must keep the game alive; 'no end of trouble, and has put us into
innumerable fixes.'

'Fixes?' repeated Lord Decimus, with a majestic pausing and pondering
on the word that made the bashful Member shut his eyes quite tight.
'Fixes?'

'A very perplexing business indeed,' observed Mr Tite Barnacle, with an
air of grave resentment.

'What,' said Lord Decimus, 'was the character of his business; what was
the nature of these--a--Fixes, Ferdinand?'

'Oh, it's a good story, as a story,' returned that gentleman; 'as good
a thing of its kind as need be. This Mr Dorrit (his name is Dorrit) had
incurred a responsibility to us, ages before the fairy came out of
the Bank and gave him his fortune, under a bond he had signed for the
performance of a contract which was not at all performed. He was a
partner in a house in some large way--spirits, or buttons, or wine, or
blacking, or oatmeal, or woollen, or pork, or hooks and eyes, or iron,
or treacle, or shoes, or something or other that was wanted for troops,
or seamen, or somebody--and the house burst, and we being among
the creditors, detainees were lodged on the part of the Crown in a
scientific manner, and all the rest Of it. When the fairy had appeared
and he wanted to pay us off, Egad we had got into such an exemplary
state of checking and counter-checking, signing and counter-signing,
that it was six months before we knew how to take the money, or how to
give a receipt for it. It was a triumph of public business,' said this
handsome young Barnacle, laughing heartily, 'You never saw such a lot of
forms in your life. "Why," the attorney said to me one day, "if I wanted