"Do you know where Mr. Matthew Pocket lives?" I asked Mr. Wemmick.
"Yes," said he, nodding in the direction. "At Hammersmith, west of
London."
"Is that far?"
"Well! Say five miles."
"Do you know him?"
"Why, you're a regular cross-examiner!" said Mr. Wemmick, looking at me
with an approving air. "Yes, I know him. I know him!"
There was an air of toleration or depreciation about his utterance of
these words that rather depressed me; and I was still looking sideways
at his block of a face in search of any encouraging note to the text,
when he said here we were at Barnard's Inn. My depression was not
alleviated by the announcement, for, I had supposed that establishment
to be an hotel kept by Mr. Barnard, to which the Blue Boar in our town
was a mere public-house. Whereas I now found Barnard to be a disembodied
spirit, or a fiction, and his inn the dingiest collection of shabby
buildings ever squeezed together in a rank corner as a club for
Tom-cats.
We entered this haven through a wicket-gate, and were disgorged by an
introductory passage into a melancholy little square that looked to me
like a flat burying-ground. I thought it had the most dismal trees in
it, and the most dismal sparrows, and the most dismal cats, and the most
dismal houses (in number half a dozen or so), that I had ever seen. I
thought the windows of the sets of chambers into which those houses were
divided were in every stage of dilapidated blind and curtain, crippled
flower-pot, cracked glass, dusty decay, and miserable makeshift; while
To Let, To Let, To Let, glared at me from empty rooms, as if no new
wretches ever came there, and the vengeance of the soul of Barnard were
being slowly appeased by the gradual suicide of the present occupants
and their unholy interment under the gravel. A frowzy mourning of soot
and smoke attired this forlorn creation of Barnard, and it had strewn
ashes on its head, and was undergoing penance and humiliation as a mere
dust-hole. Thus far my sense of sight; while dry rot and wet rot and all
the silent rots that rot in neglected roof and cellar,--rot of rat
and mouse and bug and coaching-stables near at hand besides--addressed
themselves faintly to my sense of smell, and moaned, "Try Barnard's
Mixture."
So imperfect was this realization of the first of my great expectations,
that I looked in dismay at Mr. Wemmick. "Ah!" said he, mistaking me;
"the retirement reminds you of the country. So it does me."