raniums, and the umbrella-mender, and
the man who trilled the little bell of the Dutch clock as he went along.
It was soon gone again to return no more that day; and the bands of
music and the straggling Punch's shows going after it, left it a prey
to the most dismal of organs, and white mice; with now and then a
porcupine, to vary the entertainments; until the butlers whose families
were dining out, began to stand at the house-doors in the twilight, and
the lamp-lighter made his nightly failure in attempting to brighten up
the street with gas.

It was as blank a house inside as outside. When the funeral was over,
Mr Dombey ordered the furniture to be covered up--perhaps to preserve it
for the son with whom his plans were all associated--and the rooms to be
ungarnished, saving such as he retained for himself on the ground floor.
Accordingly, mysterious shapes were made of tables and chairs,
heaped together in the middle of rooms, and covered over with great
winding-sheets. Bell-handles, window-blinds, and looking-glasses, being
papered up in journals, daily and weekly, obtruded fragmentary accounts
of deaths and dreadful murders. Every chandelier or lustre, muffled in
holland, looked like a monstrous tear depending from the ceiling's eye.
Odours, as from vaults and damp places, came out of the chimneys. The
dead and buried lady was awful in a picture-frame of ghastly bandages.
Every gust of wind that rose, brought eddying round the corner from
the neighbouring mews, some fragments of the straw that had been strewn
before the house when she was ill, mildewed remains of which were still
cleaving to the neighbourhood: and these, being always drawn by
some invisible attraction to the threshold of the dirty house to let
immediately opposite, addressed a dismal eloquence to Mr Dombey's
windows.

The apartments which Mr Dombey reserved for his own inhabiting, were
attainable from the hall, and consisted of a sitting-room; a library,
which was in fact a dressing-room, so that the smell of hot-pressed
paper, vellum, morocco, and Russia leather, contended in it with the
smell of divers pairs of boots; and a kind of conservatory or little
glass breakfast-room beyond, commanding a prospect of the trees before
mentioned, and, generally speaking, of a few prowling cats. These three
rooms opened upon one another. In the morning, when Mr Dombey was at his
breakfast in one or other of the two first-mentioned of them, as well
as in the