There was a perpetual slamming and banging of doors as the
people went in and out; and the noise of their voices and footsteps
echoed and re-echoed through the passages constantly. A young
woman, with a child in her arms, who seemed scarcely able to
crawl, from emaciation and misery, was walking up and down the
passage in conversation with her husband, who had no other
place to see her in. As they passed Mr. Pickwick, he could hear
the female sob bitterly; and once she burst into such a passion of
grief, that she was compelled to lean against the wall for support,
while the man took the child in his arms, and tried to soothe her.
Mr. Pickwick's heart was really too full to bear it, and he went
upstairs to bed.
Now, although the warder's room was a very uncomfortable
one (being, in every point of decoration and convenience, several
hundred degrees inferior to the common infirmary of a county
jail), it had at present the merit of being wholly deserted save by
Mr. Pickwick himself. So, he sat down at the foot of his little iron
bedstead, and began to wonder how much a year the warder
made out of the dirty room. Having satisfied himself, by mathematical
calculation, that the apartment was about equal in
annual value to the freehold of a small street in the suburbs of
London, he took to wondering what possible temptation could
have induced a dingy-looking fly that was crawling over his
pantaloons, to come into a close prison, when he had the choice
of so many airy situations--a course of meditation which led him to
the irresistible conclusion that the insect was insane.
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