"The stoppage of the bell, and the quiet in the prison, were a warning to depart. But he had remained too late. The inner gate was locked and the lodge closed. This brought them to the tavern establishment at the upper end of the prison, where the collegians had just vacated their social evening club. The apartment on the ground floor in which it was held was the Snuggery: the presidential tribune of the chairman, the pewter pots, glasses, pipes, tobacco ashes and general flavor of members were still as that convivial institution had left them on its adjournment. The Snuggery had two of the qualities popularly held to be essential for grog for ladies, in respect that it was hot and strong; but in the third point of analogy, requiring plenty of it, the Snuggery was defective; being but a cooped-up apartment.
"The unaccustomed visitor from the outside naturally assumed everybody to be prisoners--landlord, waiter, barmaid, potboy and all. Whether they were or not did not appear; but they all had a weedy look. The keeper of the chandler's shop in the front parlor, who took in gentlemen boarders, lent his assistance in making the bed. He had been a tailor in his time, and had kept a phaeton, he said. It was evident, from the general tone of the whole party, that they had come to regard insolvency as the normal state of mankind, and the payment of debts a disease that occasionally broke out. In this strange scene, and with these strange spectres flitting about him, Arthur Clennam looked on the preparations as if they were a part of a dream. Pending the while the long initiated Tip, with an awful enjoyment of the Snuggery's resources, pointed out the common kitchen fire maintained by subscription of the collegians, the boiler for hot water, supported in the same manner, and other premises generally tending to the deduction that the way to be healthy, wealthy and wise was to come to the Marshalsea.
"The two tables put together in a corner were, at length, converted into a very fair bed; and the stranger was left to the Windsor chairs, the presidential tribune, the beery atmosphere, sawdust, pipelights, spittoons and repose. But the last item was long, long, long in linking itself to the rest. The novelty of the place, the coming upon it without preparation, the sense of being locked up, kept him waking and unhappy. Speculations, too, bearing on the strangest relations towards the prison, but always concerning the prison, ran like nightmares through his mind while he lay awake. Whether coffins were kept ready for people who might die there, where they were kept, how they were kept, where people who died in prison were buried, how they were taken out, what forms were observed, whether an implacable creditor could arrest the dead? As to escaping, what chances were there of escape? Whether a prisoner could scale the walls with a cord and grapple? How he would descend on the other side; whether he could alight on a housetop, steal down a staircase, let himself out at a door, and get lost in the crowd? As to fire in the prison, if one were to break out while he lay there?