with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the

signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a

shower-bath of mud from Fleet Street, and which were made the

dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of

Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing “the

House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the

back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House

came with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it

in the dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into,

wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up your nose

and down your throat when they were opened and shut. Your

banknotes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing

into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among the

neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its

good polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised

strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the

fat out of their parchments into the banking-house air. Your

lighter boxes of family papers went upstairs into a Barmecide

room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a

dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven hundred

and eighty, the first letters written to you by your old love, or by

your little children, were but newly released from the horror of

being ogled through the windows, by the heads exposed on

Temple Bar with an insensate brutality and ferocity worthy of

Abyssinia or Ashantee.

But indeed, at that time, putting to death was a recipe much in

vogue with all trades and professions, and not least of all with

Tellson’s. Death is Nature’s remedy for all things, and why not

Legislation’s? Accordingly, the forger was put to Death; the

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

utterer of a bad note was put to Death; the unlawful opener of a

letter was put to Death; the purloiner of forty shillings and

sixpence was put to Death; the holder of a horse at Tellson’s door,

who made off with it, was put to Death; the coiner of a bad shilling

was put to Death; the sounders of three-fourths of the notes in the

whole gamut of Crime, were put to Death. Not that it did the least

good in the way of preventionit might almost have been worth

remarking that the fact was exactly the reversebut, it cleared off

(as to this world) the trouble of each particular case, and left

nothing else connected with it to be looked after. Thus, Tellson’s,

in its day, like greater places of business, its contemporaries, had

taken so many lives, that, if the heads laid low before it had been

ranged on Temple Bar instead of being privately disposed of, they

would probably have excluded what little light the ground floor

had, in a rather significant manner.

Cramped in all kinds of dim cupboards and hutches at

Tellson’s, the oldest of men carried on the business gravely. When

they took a young man into Tellson’s London house, they hid him