with two little counters, where the oldest of men made your

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

cheque shake as if the wind rustled it, while they examined the

signature by the dingiest of windows, which were always under a

shower-bath of mud from Fleet Street, and which were made the

dingier by their own iron bars proper, and the heavy shadow of

Temple Bar. If your business necessitated your seeing “the

House,” you were put into a species of Condemned Hold at the

back, where you meditated on a misspent life, until the House

came with its hands in its pockets, and you could hardly blink at it

in the dismal twilight. Your money came out of, or went into,

wormy old wooden drawers, particles of which flew up your nose

and down your throat when they were opened and shut. Your

banknotes had a musty odour, as if they were fast decomposing

into rags again. Your plate was stowed away among the

neighbouring cesspools, and evil communications corrupted its

good polish in a day or two. Your deeds got into extemporised

strong-rooms made of kitchens and sculleries, and fretted all the

fat out of their parchments into the banking-house air. Your

lighter boxes of family papers went upstairs into a Barmecide

room, that always had a great dining-table in it and never had a

dinner, and where, even in the year one thousand seven hundred

and