Dirty,
slipshod women passed and repassed, on their way to the cooking-
house in one corner of the yard; children screamed, and fought,
and played together, in another; the tumbling of the skittles, and
the shouts of the players, mingled perpetually with these and a
hundred other sounds; and all was noise and tumult--save in a
little miserable shed a few yards off, where lay, all quiet and
ghastly, the body of the Chancery prisoner who had died the
night before, awaiting the mockery of an inquest. The body! It is
the lawyer's term for the restless, whirling mass of cares and
anxieties, affections, hopes, and griefs, that make up the living
man. The law had his body; and there it lay, clothed in grave-
clothes, an awful witness to its tender mercy.
'Would you like to see a whistling-shop, Sir?' inquired Job Trotter.
'What do you mean?' was Mr. Pickwick's counter inquiry.
'A vistlin' shop, Sir,' interposed Mr. Weller.
'What is that, Sam?--A bird-fancier's?' inquired Mr. Pickwick.
'Bless your heart, no, Sir,' replied Job; 'a whistling-shop, Sir, is
where they sell spirits.' Mr. Job Trotter briefly explained here,
that all persons, being prohibited under heavy penalties from
conveying spirits into debtors' prisons, and such commodities
being highly prized by the ladies and gentlemen confined therein,
it had occurred to some speculative turnkey to connive, for
certain lucrative considerations, at two or three prisoners retailing
the favourite article of gin, for their own profit and advantage.
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