no more, but black as ebony--my
sight lost itself in a gloomy vault, showing faint indications in it
of a shipwreck of canvas and cordage. Methought I felt much as a diver
might, at the bottom of the sea.

In those small hours when there was no movement in the streets, it
afforded matter for reflection to take Newgate in the way, and,
touching its rough stone, to think of the prisoners in their sleep,
and then to glance in at the lodge over the spiked wicket, and see the
fire and light of the watching turnkeys, on the white wall. Not an
inappropriate time either, to linger by that wicked little Debtors'
Door--shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw--which has
been Death's Door to so many. In the days of the uttering of forged
one-pound notes by people tempted up from the country, how many
hundreds of wretched creatures of both sexes--many quite
innocent--swung out of a pitiless and inconsistent world, with the
tower of yonder Christian church of Saint Sepulchre monstrously before
their eyes! Is there any haunting of the Bank Parlour, by the
remorseful souls of old directors, in the nights of these later days,
I wonder, or is it as quiet as this degenerate Aceldama of an Old
Bailey?

To walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and bemoaning the
present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would take it,
and would make my houseless circuit of the Bank, and give a thought to
the treasure within; likewise to the guard of soldiers passing the
night there, and nodding over the fire. Next, I went to Billingsgate,
in some hope of market-people, but it proving as yet too early,
crossed London-bridge and got down by the waterside on the Surrey
shore among the buildings of the great brewery. There was plenty going
on at the brewery; and the reek, and the smell of grains, and the
rattling of the plump dray horses at their mangers, were capital
company. Quite refreshed by having mingled with this good society, I
made a new start with a new heart, setting the old King's Bench prison
before me for my next object, and resolving, when I should come to the
wall, to think of poor Horace Kinch, and the Dry Rot in men.

A very curious disease the Dry Rot in men, and difficult to detect the
beginning of. It had carried Horace Kinch inside the wall of the old
King's Bench prison, and it had carried him out with his feet
foremost. He was a likely man to look at, in the prime of life, well
to do, as clever as he