Not an inappropriate time either, to linger by that wicked little
Debtors’ Door – shutting tighter than any other door one ever saw –
which has been Death’s Door to so many. In the days of the
uttering of forged one-pound notes by people tempted up from the
country, how many hundreds of wretched creatures of both sexes –
many quite innocent – swung out of a pitiless and inconsistent
world, with the tower of yonder Christian church of Saint Sepulchre
monstrously before their eyes! Is there any haunting of the Bank
Parlour, by the remorseful souls of old directors, in the nights of
these later days, I wonder, or is it as quiet as this degenerate
Aceldama of an Old Bailey?
To walk on to the Bank, lamenting the good old times and bemoaning
the present evil period, would be an easy next step, so I would
take it, and would make my houseless circuit of the Bank, and give
a thought to the treasure within; likewise to the guard of soldiers
passing the night there, and nodding over the fire. Next, I went
to Billingsgate, in some hope of market-people, but it proving as
yet too early, crossed London-bridge and got down by the water-side
on the Surrey shore among the buildings of the great brewery.
There was plenty going on at the brewery; and the reek, and the
smell of grains, and the rattling of the plump dray horses at their
mangers, were capital company. Quite refreshed by having mingled
with this good society, I made a new start with a new heart,
setting the old King’s Bench prison before me for my next object,
and resolving, when I should come to the wall, to think of poor
Horace Kinch, and the Dry Rot in men.
A very curious disease the Dry Rot in men, and difficult to detect
the beginning of. It had carried Horace Kinch inside the wall of
the old King’s Bench prison, and it had carried him out with his
feet foremost. He was a likely man to look at, in the prime of
life, well to do, as clever as he needed to be, and popular among
many friends. He was suitably married, and had healthy and pretty
children. But, like some fair-looking houses or fair-looking
ships, he took the Dry Rot. The first strong external revelation
of the Dry Rot in men, is a tendency to lurk and lounge; to be at
street-corners without intelligible reason; to be going anywhere
when met; to be about many places rather than at any; to do nothing
tangible, but to have an intention of performing a variety of
intangible duties to-morrow or the day after. When this
manifestation of the disease is observed, the observer will usually
connect it with a vague impression once formed or received, that
the patient was living a little too hard. He will scarcely have
had leisure to turn it over in his mind and form the terrible
suspicion ‘Dry Rot,’ when he will notice a change for the worse in
the patient’s appearance: a certain slovenliness and
deterioration, which is not poverty, nor dirt, nor intoxication,
nor ill-health, but simply Dry Rot. To this, succeeds a smell as
of strong waters, in the morning; to that, a looseness respecting
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money; to that, a stronger smell as of strong waters, at all times;
to that, a looseness respecting everything; to that, a trembling of
the limbs, somnolency, misery, and crumbling to pieces. As it is
in wood, so it is in men. Dry Rot advances at a compound usury
quite incalculable. A plank is found infected with it, and the
whole structure is devoted. Thus it had been with the unhappy
Horace Kinch, lately buried by a small subscription. Those who
knew him had not nigh done saying, ‘So well off, so comfortably
established, with such hope before him – and yet, it is feared,
with a slight touch of Dry Rot!’ when lo! the man was all Dry Rot
and dust.
From the dead wall associated on those houseless nights with this
too common story, I chose next to wander by Bethlehem Hospital;