assistance in
making the bed. He had been a tailor in his time, and had kept a phaëton, he
said. He boasted that he stood up litigiously for the interests of the college;
and he had undefined and undefinable ideas that the marshal intercepted a Fund,
which ought to come to the collegians. He liked to believe this, and always
impressed the shadowy grievance on new-comers and strangers; though he could
not, for his life, have explained what Fund he meant, or how the notion had got
rooted in his soul. He had fully convinced himself, notwithstanding, that his
own proper share of the Fund was three and ninepence a week; and that in this
amount he, as an individual collegian, was swindled by the marshal, regularly
every Monday. Apparently, he helped to make the bed, that he might not lose an
opportunity of stating this case; after which unloading of his mind, and after
announcing (as it seemed he always did, without anything coming of it) that he
was going to write a letter to the papers and show the marshal up, he fell into
miscellaneous conversation with the rest. It was evident from the general tone
of the whole party, that they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state
of mankind, and the payment of debts as a disease that occasionally broke out.
    In this strange scene, and with these strange spectres flitting about him,
Arthur Clennam looked on at the preparations, as if they were part of a dream.
Pending which, the long-initiated Tip, with an awful enjoyment of the Snuggery's
resources, pointed out the common kitchen fire maintained by subscription of
collegians, the boiler for hot water supported in like manner, and other
premises generally tending to the deduction that the way to be healthy, wealthy,
and wise, was to come to the Marshalsea.
    The two tables put together in a corner, were, at length, converted into a
very fair bed; and the stranger was left to the Windsor chairs, the presidential
tribune, the beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipe-lights, spittoons and repose. But
the last item was long, long, long, in linking itself to the rest. The novelty
of the place, the coming upon it without preparation, the sense of being locked
up, the remembrance of that room up-stairs, of the two brothers, and above all
of the retiring childish form, and the face in which he now saw years of
insufficient food, if not of want, kept him waking and unhappy.
    Speculations, too, bearing