your soul, sir,' urged the Plasterer, 'I did indeed. I'd do more
by you than the rest of 'em do, I fancy.'

'What would you do?' he asked.

'I'd come back to see you, after I was let out.'

'Give me the money again,' said the other, eagerly, 'and I'll keep it,
and never spend it. Thank you for it, thank you! I shall see you again?'
'If I live a week you shall.'

They shook hands and parted. The collegians, assembled in Symposium in
the Snuggery that night, marvelled what had happened to their Father; he
walked so late in the shadows of the yard, and seemed so downcast.

CHAPTER 7. The Child of the Marshalsea

The baby whose first draught of air had been tinctured with Doctor
Haggage's brandy, was handed down among the generations of collegians,
like the tradition of their common parent. In the earlier stages of her
existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being
almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse
the child who had been born in the college.

'By rights,' remarked the turnkey when she was first shown to him, 'I
ought to be her godfather.'

The debtor irresolutely thought of it for a minute, and said, 'Perhaps
you wouldn't object to really being her godfather?'

'Oh! _I_ don't object,' replied the turnkey, 'if you don't.'

Thus it came to pass that she was christened one Sunday afternoon, when
the turnkey, being relieved, was off the lock; and that the turnkey
went up to the font of Saint George's Church, and promised and vowed and
renounced on her behalf, as he himself related when he came back, 'like
a good 'un.'

This invested the turnkey with a new proprietary share in the child,
over and above his former official one. When she began to walk and talk,
he became fond of her; bought a little arm-chair and stood it by the
high fender of the lodge fire-place; liked to have her company when he
was on the lock; and used to bribe her with cheap toys to come and talk
to him. The child, for her part, soon grew so fond of the turnkey that
she would come climbing up the lodge-steps of her own accord at all
hours of the day. When she fell asleep in the little armchair by the
high fender, the turnkey would cover her with his pocket-handkerchief;
and when she sat in it dressing and undressing a doll which soon came
to be unlike dolls on the other side of the lock, and to bear a horrible
family resemblance to Mrs Bangham--he would contemplate her from the