considers him
an imbecile civilian, a remnant of the barbarous watchmen-times; but gives him
admission, as something that must be borne with until Government shall abolish
him. The sensation is heightened, as the tidings spread from mouth to mouth that
the beadle is on the ground, and has gone in.
    By-and-by the beadle comes out, once more intensifying the sensation, which
has rather languished in the interval. He is understood to be in want of
witnesses, for the Inquest to-morrow, who can tell the Coroner and Jury anything
whatever respecting the deceased. Is immediately referred to innumerable people
who can tell nothing whatever. Is made more imbecile by being constantly
informed that Mrs. Green's son was a law-writer his-self, and knowed him better
than anybody - which son of Mrs. Green's appears, on inquiry, to be at the
present time aboard a vessel bound for China, three months out, but considered
accessible by telegraph, on application to the Lords of the Admiralty. Beadle
goes into various shops and parlours, examining the inhabitants; always shutting
the door first, and by exclusion, delay, and general idiotcy, exasperating the
public. Policeman seen to smile to potboy. Public loses interest, and undergoes
reaction. Taunts the beadle, in shrill youthful voices, with having boiled a
boy; choruses fragments of a popular song to that effect, and importing that the
boy was made into soup for the workhouse. Policeman at last finds it necessary
to support the law, and seize a vocalist; who is released upon the flight of the
rest, on condition of his getting out of this then, come! and cutting it - a
condition he immediately observes. So the sensation dies off for the time; and
the unmoved policeman (to whom a little opium, more or less, is nothing), with
his shining hat, stiff stock, inflexible great-coat, stout belt and bracelet,
and all things fitting, pursues his lounging way with a heavy tread: beating the
palms of his white gloves one against the other, and stopping now and then, at a
street-corner, to look casually about for anything between a lost child and a
murder.
    Under cover of the night, the feeble-minded beadle comes flitting about
Chancery Lane with his summonses, in which every Juror's name is wrongly spelt,
and nothing rightly spelt but the beadle's own name, which nobody can read or
wants to know. The summonses served, and his witnesses forewarned, the beadle
goes to Mr. Krook