out of
the way, and there was a great empty well before them, looking down into the
depths of which Fanny said, »Now, uncle!« Little Dorrit, as her eyes became used
to the darkness, faintly made him out, at the bottom of the well, in an obscure
corner by himself, with his instrument in its ragged case under his arm.
    The old man looked as if the remote high gallery windows, with their little
strip of sky, might have been the point of his better fortunes, from which he
had descended, until he had gradually sunk down below there to the bottom. He
had been in that place six nights a week for many years, but had never been
observed to raise his eyes above his music-book, and was confidently believed to
have never seen a play. There were legends in the place that he did not so much
as know the popular heroes and heroines by sight, and that the low comedian had
mugged at him in his richest manner fifty nights for a wager, and he had shown
no trace of consciousness. The carpenters had a joke to the effect that he was
dead without being aware of it; and the frequenters of the pit supposed him to
pass his whole life, night and day, and Sunday and all, in the orchestra. They
had tried him a few times with pinches of snuff offered over the rails, and he
had always responded to this attention with a momentary waking up of manner that
had the pale phantom of a gentleman in it: beyond this he never, on any
occasion, had any other part in what was going on than the part written out for
the clarionet; in private life, where there was no part for the clarionet, he
had no part at all. Some said he was poor, some said he was a wealthy miser; but
he said nothing, never lifted up his bowed head, never varied his shuffling gait
by getting his springless foot from the ground. Though expecting now to be
summoned by his niece, he did not hear her until she had spoken to him three or
four times; nor was he at all surprised by the presence of two nieces instead of
one, but merely said in his tremulous voice, »I am coming, I am coming!« and
crept forth by some underground way which emitted a cellarous smell.
    »And so, Amy,« said her sister, when the three together passed out, at the
door that had such a shame-faced consciousness of being different from other
doors: the uncle instinctively taking Amy's