her with cheap toys to come and talk to him. The child, for her part, soon
grew so fond of the turnkey, that she would come climbing up the lodge-steps of
her own accord at all hours of the day. When she fell asleep in the little
arm-chair by the high fender, the turnkey would cover her with his
pocket-handkerchief; and when she sat in it dressing and undressing a doll -
which soon came to be unlike dolls on the other side of the lock, and to bear a
horrible family resemblance to Mrs. Bangham - he would contemplate her from the
top of his stool with exceeding gentleness. Witnessing these things, the
collegians would express an opinion that the turnkey, who was a bachelor, had
been cut out by nature for a family man. But the turnkey thanked them, and said,
»No, on the whole it was enough to see other people's children there.«
    At what period of her early life the little creature began to perceive that
it was not the habit of all the world to live locked up in narrow yards
surrounded by high walls with spikes at the top, would be a difficult question
to settle. But she was a very, very little creature indeed, when she had somehow
gained the knowledge, that her clasp of her father's hand was to be always
loosened at the door which the great key opened; and that while her own light
steps were free to pass beyond it, his feet must never cross that line. A
pitiful and plaintive look, with which she had begun to regard him when she was
still extremely young, was perhaps a part of this discovery.
    With a pitiful and plaintive look for everything indeed, but with something
in it for only him that was like protection, this Child of the Marshalsea and
child of the Father of the Marshalsea, sat by her friend the turnkey in the
lodge, kept the family room, or wandered about the prison-yard, for the first
eight years of her life. With a pitiful and plaintive look for her wayward
sister; for her idle brother; for the high blank walls; for the faded crowd they
shut in; for the games of the prison children as they whooped and ran, and
played at hide-and-seek, and made the iron bars of the inner gateway Home.
    Wistful and wondering, she would sit in summer weather by the high fender in
the lodge, looking up at the sky through the barred window, until bars of light
would arise, when she turned her eyes away, between