The lamplighter was going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets
sprang up under his touch, one might have fancied them astonished
at being suffered to introduce any show of brightness into such a
dismal scene.

Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked
out. In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand
fresh scents, and every drop would have had its bright association
with some beautiful form of growth or life. In the city, it
developed only foul stale smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-
stained, wretched addition to the gutters.

He crossed by St Paul's and went down, at a long angle, almost to
the water's edge, through some of the crooked and descending
streets which lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between
the river and Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some
obsolete Worshipful Company, now the illuminated windows of a
Congregationless Church that seemed to be waiting for some
adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and discover its history; passing
silent warehouses and wharves, and here and there a narrow alley
leading to the river, where a wretched little bill,
FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the
house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but
black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square
court-yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank
(which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were
rusty; behind it, a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with
long, narrow, heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had
it in its mind to slide down sideways; it had been propped up,
however, and was leaning on some half-dozen gigantic crutches: