e,
hazel eyes and a figure as small as a child's. She wore a spare thin
dress, spoke little, and passed through the rooms noiselessly and shy.
They called her "Little Dorrit." She came in the morning and sewed
quietly till nightfall, when she vanished. It had been so rare in the
old days for any one to please the mistress of that gloomy house that
the little creature's presence there interested Arthur greatly and he
longed to know something of her history.

He soon found there was nothing to be learned from Flintwinch, and so
one night he followed Little Dorrit when she left the house. To his
great surprise he saw her finally enter a great bare building surrounded
with spiked walls and called The Marshalsea.

This was a famous prison where debtors were kept. In those days the law
not only permitted a man to be put in jail for debt, but compelled him
to stay there till all he owed was paid--a strange custom, since while
he was in jail he was unable to earn any money to pay with. In fact, in
many cases poor debtors had to stay there all their lives.

Inside the walls of the Marshalsea the wives and children of unfortunate
prisoners were allowed to come to live with them just as in a
boarding-house or hotel, but the debtors themselves could never pass out
of the gate. Arthur entered the prison ignorant of its rules and so
stayed too long, for presently the bell for closing rang, the gates were
shut, and he had to stay inside all night. This was not so pleasant, but
it gave him a chance easily to find out all he wished to learn of Little
Dorrit's history.

Her father, before she was born, had lost all his money through a
business failure, and had thus been thrown into the Marshalsea. There
Amy, or Little Dorrit, as they came to call her, was born; there her
mother had languished away, and there she herself had always lived,
mothering her pretty frivolous sister Fanny, and her lazy, ne'er-do-well
brother, "Tip."

Her father had been an inmate of the prison so many years that he was
called "The Father of the Marshalsea." From being a haughty man of
wealth, he had become a shabby old white-haired dignitary with a soft
manner, who took little gifts of money which any one gave him
half-shame-facedly and to the mortification of Little Dorrit alone.

The child had grown up the favorite of the turnkeys and of all the
prison, calling the high, blank walls "home." When she was a little slip
of a girl she had her sister and bro