"Well, Amy, well. I don't quite follow you, but it's natural I suppose
that Fanny should prefer to be outside, and even that you often should,
too. So, you and Fanny and your uncle, my dear, shall have your own way.
Good, good. I'll not meddle; don't mind me."

To get her brother out of the prison; out of the low work of running
errands for the prisoners outside, and out of the bad company into which
he had fallen, was her hardest task. At eighteen years of age her
brother Edward would have dragged on from hand to mouth, from hour to
hour, from penny to penny, until eighty. Nobody got into the prison from
whom he gained anything useful or good, and she could find no patron
for him but her old friend and godfather, the turnkey.

"Dear Bob," said she, "what is to become of poor Tip?" His name was
Edward, and Ted had been changed into Tip, within the walls.

The turnkey had strong opinions of his own as to what would become of
poor Tip, and had even gone so far with the view of preventing their
fulfilment, as to talk to Tip in urging him to run away and serve his
country as a soldier. But Tip had thanked him, and said he didn't seem
to care for his country.

"Well, my dear," said the turnkey, "something ought to be done with him.
Suppose I try and get him into the law?"

"That would be so good of you, Bob!"

The turnkey now began to speak to the lawyers as they passed in and out
of the prison. He spoke so perseveringly that a stool and twelve
shillings a week were at last found for Tip in the office of a lawyer at
Clifford's Inn, in the Palace Court.

Tip idled in Clifford's Inn for six months, and at the end of that term
sauntered back one evening with his hands in his pockets, and remarked
to his sister that he was not going back again.

"Not going back again?" said the poor little anxious Child of the
Marshalsea, always calculating and planning for Tip, in the front rank
of her charges.

"I am so tired of it," said Tip, "that I have cut it."

Tip tired of everything. With intervals of Marshalsea lounging, and
errand-running, his small second mother, aided by her trusty friend, got
him into a warehouse, into a market garden, into the hop trade, into the
law again, into an auctioneer's, into a brewery, into a stockbroker's,
into the law again, into a coach office, into a wagon office, into the
law again, into a general dealer's, into a distillery, into the law
again, into a wool house, into a dry goods house, i