'That would be so good of you, Bob!'
The turnkey had now two points to put to the professional gentlemen as
they passed in and out. He put this second one so perseveringly that
a stool and twelve shillings a week were at last found for Tip in the
office of an attorney in a great National Palladium called the Palace
Court; at that time one of a considerable list of everlasting bulwarks
to the dignity and safety of Albion, whose places know them no more.
Tip languished in Clifford's Inns for six months, and at the expiration
of that term sauntered back one evening with his hands in his pockets,
and incidentally observed to his sister that he was not going back
again. 'Not going back again?' said the poor little anxious Child of the
Marshalsea, always calculating and planning for Tip, in the front rank
of her charges. 'I am so tired of it,' said Tip, 'that I have cut it.'
Tip tired of everything. With intervals of Marshalsea lounging, and Mrs
Bangham succession, his small second mother, aided by her trusty friend,
got him into a warehouse, into a market garden, into the hop trade,
into the law again, into an auctioneers, into a brewery, into a
stockbroker's, into the law again, into a coach office, into a waggon
office, into the law again, into a general dealer's, into a distillery,
into the law again, into a wool house, into a dry goods house, into the
Billingsgate trade, into the foreign fruit trade, and into the docks.
But whatever Tip went into, he came out of tired, announcing that he
had cut it. Wherever he went, this foredoomed Tip appeared to take the
prison walls with him, and to set them up in such trade or calling;
and to prowl about within their narrow limits in the old slip-shod,
purposeless, down-at-heel way; until the real immovable Marshalsea walls
asserted their fascination over him, and brought him back.
Nevertheless, the brave little creature did so fix her heart on her
brother's rescue, that while he was ringing out these doleful changes,
she pinched and scraped enough together to ship him for Canada. When he
was tired of nothing to do, and disposed in its turn to cut even that,
he graciously consented to go to Canada. And there was grief in her
bosom over parting with him, and joy in the hope of his being put in a
straight course at last.
'God bless you, dear Tip. Don't be too proud to come and see us, when
you have made your fortune.' 'All right!' said Tip, and went.