XI. MR. AND MRS. CHADBAND AND THE SNAGSBYS

211

XII. SIR LEICESTER AND LADY DEDLOCK AND MR. TULKINGHORN

336

BLEAK HOUSE.

CHAPTER I.

IN CHANCERY.

of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds.

LONDON. Michaelmas Term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn-hill. Smoke lowering down from chimney-pots, making a soft black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snow-flakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's um- Gas looming through the fog in divers brellas, in a general infection of ill-places in the streets, much as the sun temper, and losing their foot-hold at street-corners, where tens of thousands of other foot passengers have been slipping and sliding since the day broke (if this day ever broke), adding new deposits to the crust upon crust of mud, sticking at those points tenaciously to the pavement, and accumulating at compound interest.

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses

may, from the spongey fields, be seen to loom by husbandman and ploughboy. Most of the shops lighted two hours before their time. as the gas seems to know, for it has a haggard and unwilling lock.

The raw afternoon is rawest, and the dense fog is densest, and the muddy streets are muddiest, near that leadenheaded old obstruction, appropriate ornament for the threshold of a leadenheaded old corporation: Temple Bar. And hard by Temple Bar, in Lincoln's Inn Hall, at the very heart of the fog, sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery.

Never can there come fog too thick,

B

never can there come mud and mire too deep, to assort with the groping and floundering condition which this High Court of Chancery, most pestilent of hoary sinners, holds, this day, in the sight of heaven and earth.

Chancery; which has its decaying houses and its blighted lands in every shire; which has its worn-out lunatic in every madhouse, and its dead in every churchyard; which has its ruined suitor, with his slipshod heels and threadbare dress, borrowing and begging through the round of every man's acquaintance; which gives to monied might, the means bundantly of wearying out the right; which so exhausts finances, patience, courage, hope; so overthrows the brain and breaks the heart; that there is not an honorable man among its practitioners who would not give-who does not often givethe warning, "Suffer any wrong that can be done you, rather than come here!"

On such an afternoon, if ever, the Lord High Chancellor ought to be sitting here as here he is -with a foggy glory round his head, softly fenced in with crimson cloth and curtains, addressed by a large advocate with great whiskers, a little voice, and an interminable brief, and outwardly directing his contemplation to the lantern in the roof, where he can see nothing but fog. On such an afternoon, some score of members of the High Court of Chancery bar ought to be-as here they are-mistily engaged in one of the ten thousand stages of an Who happen to be in the Lord Chanendless cause, tripping one another up cellor's court this murky afternoon beon slippery precedents, groping knee- sides the Lord Chancellor, the counsel deep in technicalities, running their in the cause, two or three counsel who goat-hair and horse-hair warded heads are never in any cause, and the well of against walls of words, and making a solicitors before mentioned? There is pretence of equity with serious faces, as the registrar below the Judge, in wig players might. On such an afternoon, and gown; and there are two or three the various solicitors in the cause, some maces, or petty-bags, or privy-purses, two or three of whom have inherited it or whatever they may be, in legal court from their fathers, who made a fortune suits. These are all yawning; for no by it, ought to be-as are they not?- crumb of amusement ever falls from ranged in a line, in a long matted well JARNDYCE AND JARNDYCE (the cause in (but you might look in vain for Truth hand), which was squeezed dry years at the bottom of it), between the regis- upon years ago. The short-hand writers, trar's red table and the silk gowns, the reporters of the court, and the with bills, cross-bills, answers, re- reporters of the newspapers, invariably joinders, injunctions, affidavits, issues, decamp with the rest of the regulars references to masters, masters' reports, when Jarndyce and Jarndyce comes on. mountains of costly nonsense, piled Their places are a blank. Standing on before them. Well may the court be a seat at the side of the hall, the better dim, with wasting candles here and to peer into the curtained sanctuary, is there; well may the fog hang heavy in a little mad old woman in a squeezed it, as if it would never get out; well bonnet, who is always in court, from its may the stained glass windows lose sitting to its rising, and always expecttheir color, and admit no light of day ing some incomprehensible judgment to into the place; well may the uninitiated be given in her favor. Some say she from the streets, who peep in through really is, or was, a party to a suit; but the glass panes in the door, be deterred no one knows for certain, because no from entrance by its owlish aspect, and one cares. She carrieş some small litter by the drawl languidly echoing to the in a reticule which she calls her docuroof from the padded dais where the Lord High Chancellor looks into the lantern that has no light in it, and where the attendant wigs are all stuck in a fog-bank! This is the Court of

ments; principally consisting of paper matches and dry lavender. A sallow prisoner has come up, in custody, for the half-dozenth time, to make a personal application "to purge himself of