but me, and I have nearly
forgotten it.«
    The old man looked round the table, and leered more horribly than ever, as
if in triumph, at the attention which was depicted in every face. Then rubbing
his chin with his hand, and looking up to the ceiling as if to recall the
circumstances to his memory, he began as follows:
 
                   The Old Man's Tale about the Queer Client.
 
»It matters little,« said the old man, »where, or how, I picked up this brief
history. If I were to relate it in the order in which it reached me, I should
commence in the middle, and when I had arrived at the conclusion, go back for a
beginning. It is enough for me to say that some of its circumstances passed
before my own eyes. For the remainder I know them to have happened, and there
are some persons yet living, who will remember them but too well.
    In the Borough High Street, near Saint George's Church, and on the same side
of the way, stands, as most people know, the smallest of our debtors' prisons,
the Marshalsea. Although in later times it has been a very different place from
the sink of filth and dirt it once was, even its improved condition holds out
but little temptation to the extravagant, or consolation to the improvident. The
condemned felon has as good a yard for air and exercise in Newgate, as the
insolvent debtor in the Marshalsea Prison.4
    It may be my fancy, or it may be that I cannot separate the place from the
old recollections associated with it, but this part of London I cannot bear. The
street is broad, the shops are spacious, the noise of passing vehicles, the
footsteps of a perpetual stream of people - all the busy sounds of traffic,
resound in it from morn to midnight, but the streets around are mean and close;
poverty and debauchery lie festering in the crowded alleys; want and misfortune
are pent up in the narrow prison; an air of gloom and dreariness seems, in my
eyes at least, to hang about the scene, and to impart to it a squalid and sickly
hue.
    Many eyes, that have long since been closed in the grave, have looked round
upon that scene lightly enough, when entering the gate of the old Marshalsea
Prison for the first time: for despair seldom comes with the first severe shock
of misfortune. A man has confidence in untried friends, he remembers the many
offers of service so freely made by his boon companions when he wanted them