"Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?" I asked Mr. Wemmick.

"Yes," said he, nodding in the direction. "At Hammersmith, west of

London."

"Is that far?"

"Well! Say five miles."

"Do you know him?"

"Why, you're a regular cross-examiner!" said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me

with an approving air. "Yes, I know him. I know him!"

There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of

these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways

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at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text,

when he said here we were at Barnard's Inn. My depression was not

alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment

to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town

was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied

spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby

buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for

Tom-cats.

We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an

introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me

like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in

it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most

dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I

thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were

divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled

flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while

To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new

wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were

being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants

and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot

and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn

ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere

dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all

the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar,--rot of rat

and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides--addressed

themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, "Try Barnard's

Mixture."

So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expectations,

that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. "Ah!" said he, mistaking me;

"the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me."




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