noisy and riotous conversation over
half-emptied pots of beer, or playing at all-fours with a very greasy pack of
cards. In the adjoining room, some solitary tenant might be seen, poring, by the
light of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers,
yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age: writing, for the hundredth
time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the perusal of some great
man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose heart it would never touch. In a
third, a man, with his wife and a whole crowd of children, might be seen making
up a scanty bed on the ground, or upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to
pass the night in. And in a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth, and a seventh, the
noise, and the beer, and the tobacco-smoke, and the cards, all came over again
in greater force than before.
    In the galleries themselves, and more especially on the staircases, there
lingered a great number of people, who came there, some because their rooms were
empty and lonesome, others because their rooms were full and hot: the greater
part because they were restless and uncomfortable, and not possessed of the
secret of exactly knowing what to do with themselves. There were many classes of
people here, from the labouring man in his fustian jacket, to the broken-down
spendthrift in his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at elbows; but
there was the same air about them all - a listless jail-bird careless swagger, a
vagabondish who's-afraid sort of bearing, which is wholly indescribable in
words, but which any man can understand in one moment if he wish, by setting
foot in the nearest debtor's prison, and looking at the very first group of
people he sees there, with the same interest as Mr. Pickwick did.
    »It strikes me, Sam,« said Mr. Pickwick, leaning over the iron-rail at the
stairhead, »It strikes me, Sam, that imprisonment for debt is scarcely any
punishment at all.«
    »Think not, sir?« inquired Mr. Weller.
    »You see how these fellows drink, and smoke, and roar,« replied Mr.
Pickwick. »It's quite impossible that they can mind it much.«
    »Ah, that's just the wery thing, sir,« rejoined Sam, »they don't mind it;
it's a regular holiday to them