Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the

law to take care of itself. I give you that advice.”

“It’s the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice,” said

Jerry. “I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living

mine is.”

“Well, well,” said the old clerk; “we all have our various ways of

gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us

have dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along.”

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less

internal deference than he made an outward show of, “You are a

lean old one, too,” made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of

his destination, and went his way.

They hanged at Tyburn in those days, so the street outside

Newgate had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since

attached to it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of

debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases

were bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes

rushed straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself,

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

and pulled him off the bench. It had more than once happened,

that the Judge in the black cap pronounced his own doom as

certainly as the prisoner’s, and even died before him. For the rest,

the Old Bailey was famous as a kind of deadly inn-yard, from

which pale travellers set out continually, in carts and coaches, on a

violent passage into the other world: traversing some two miles

and a half of public street and road, and shaming few good

citizens, if any. So powerful is use, and so desirable to be good use

in the beginning. It was famous, too, for the pillory, a wise old

institution, that inflicted a punishment of which no one could

foresee the extent; also, for the whipping-post, another dear old

institution, very humanising and softening to behold in action;

also, for extensive transactions in blood-money, another fragment

of ancestral wisdom, systematically leading to the most frightful

mercenary crimes that could be committed under Heaven.

Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date, was a choice illustration of

the precept that “Whatever is, is right”; an aphorism that would be

as final as it is lazy, did it not include the troublesome

consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

Making his way through the tainted crowd, dispersed up and

down this hideous scene of action, with the skill of a man

accustomed to make his way quietly, the messenger found out the

door he sought, and handed in his letter through a trap in it. For,

people then paid to see the play at the Old Bailey, just as they paid

to see the play in Bedlamonly the former entertainment was

much the dearer. Therefore, all the Old Bailey doors were well

guardedexcept, indeed, the social doors by which the criminals

got there, and those were always left wide open.

After some delay and demur, the door grudgingly turned on its

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

hinges a very little way, and allowed Mr. Jerry Cruncher to