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"That's all. He wishes to have a messenger at hand. This is to tell
him you are there."

As the ancient clerk deliberately folded and superscribed the note,
Mr. Cruncher, after surveying him in silence until he came to the
blotting-paper stage, remarked:

"I suppose they'll be trying Forgeries this morning?"

"Treason!"

"That's quartering," said Jerry. "Barbarous!"

"It is the law," remarked the ancient clerk, turning his surprised
spectacles upon him. "It is the law."

"It's hard in the law to spile a man, I think. Ifs hard enough to
kill him, but it's wery hard to spile him, sir."

"Not at all," retained the ancient clerk. "Speak well of the law.
Take care of your chest and voice, my good friend, and leave the law
to take care of itself. I give you that advice."

"It's the damp, sir, what settles on my chest and voice," said Jerry.
"I leave you to judge what a damp way of earning a living mine is."

"Well, well," said the old clerk; "we all have our various ways of
gaining a livelihood. Some of us have damp ways, and some of us have
dry ways. Here is the letter. Go along."

Jerry took the letter, and, remarking to himself with less internal
deference than he made an outward show of, "You are a lean old one,
too," made his bow, informed his son, in passing, of his destination,
and went his way.

They hanged at Tyburn, in those days, so the street outside Newgate
had not obtained one infamous notoriety that has since attached to
it. But, the gaol was a vile place, in which most kinds of
debauchery and villainy were practised, and where dire diseases were
bred, that came into court with the prisoners, and sometimes rushed
straight from the dock at my Lord Chief Justice himself, and pulled
him off the bench. It had more than once happened, that the Judge in
the black cap pronounced his own doom as certainly as the prisoner's,
and even died before him. For the rest, the Old Bailey was famous as
a kind of deadly inn-yard, from which pale travellers set out
continually, in carts and coaches, on a violent passage into the
other world: traversing some two miles and a half of public street
and road, and shaming few good citizens, if any. So powerful is use,
and so desirable to be good use in the beginning. It was famous,
too, for the pillory, a wise old institution, that inflicted a
punishment of which no one could foresee the extent; also, for the
whipping-post, another dear old institution, very humanising and
softening to behold in action; also, for extensive transactions in
blood-money, another fragment of ancestral wisdom, systematically
leading to the most frightful mercenary crimes that could be
committed under Heaven. Altogether, the Old Bailey, at that date,
was a choice illustration of the precept, that "Whatever is is right;"
an aphorism that would be as final as it is lazy, did it not include
the troublesome consequence, that nothing that ever was, was wrong.

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