ts
were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old
places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy
glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen
enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to
fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began
to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out
hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet
umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had
been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it
seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to
have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was
going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch,
one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce
any show of brightness into such a dismal scene.

Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked out.
In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents,
and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful
form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale
smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to
the gutters.

He crossed by St Paul's and went down, at a long angle, almost to the
water's edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which
lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and
Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful
Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that
seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and
discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here
and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little
bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the
house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black,
standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard
where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying
much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it,
a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with long, narrow,
heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to
slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on
some half-do