CHAPTER XI

THE VESTRY OF ST. GEORGE'S CHURCH, SOUTHWARK, WHERE LITTLE DORRIT AND MAGGY PASSED THE NIGHT

IS this the church where Little Dorrit

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slept on the pew cushions in the vestry?" "It is," replied the "sexton or the beadle or the verger, or whatever he was."

"Can I come in and make a drawing of the room? Not now, but on any day most convenient to you and at an hour when I shall not disturb the church service.'

"Well, I don't know whether you can or not," said the verger, or the beadle, or the sexton, "we have to be very careful -particular careful. We came near being blowed up by a couple of crazy women carrying bombs or something. Orders are very strict."

"If I were searched at the door, and my match-box, scarf-pin, and penknife taken away from me, would it make any difference?"

"It might, and it mightn't. You'll have to ask the warden. You'll find him next to the fruiterer's across the way. There ain't

but one, and you can't miss it.'

"Can I see the vestry?"

"You can. Come in. It was over in the corner between the fireplace and the wall where they say they piled the cushions."

There is no use in my describing the room, my sketch tells the story.

Just at this juncture, a faded, half-sized little woman with a face as shrivelled as a last year's apple, one bird-claw hand gripping a dingy, black silk wrap, moved into the room. She had overheard my inquiry and wanted to be of assistance.

"I can tell you anything you want to know, sir. I've been here more than forty-six years. My name is and I am in charge of the outside work of and she gave me her

name and occupation, both of which I forget, and which, if I could remember, I would not put into print.

"This room," she continued, "is where all the business of the church is done, and there hasn't been a tuppence spent on it since I've been here; and it looks just as it did when I first came. So I suppose it is just the same as

when Maggy and Little Dorrit spent the night over there. Step this way and I'll show you the very spot. Right here between this fender and the corner of that wall. Wait, I'll move the chair."

I warmed to her at once. She did not tell me that Mr. Dickens, who, as a boy, lived in this Borough and therefore knew the inside and outside of St. George's Church, Southwark, better than he did the inside and outside of St. Paul's or Westminster Abbey, and who, in casting about for some place where Little Dorrit could rest her weary feet, had recalled this same vestry, driving in, no doubt, from Gad's Hill (where the novel was finished) and so on across Southwark or London Bridge, stopping at the same steps at which my own cab was now waiting, and having asked for "the beadle or the verger or the sexton," just as I had asked, had, after refreshing his memory, returned home to develop the mental negative which his eyes had focussed.

No, the little, old, half-sized lady with the bird-claw hand and dried-apple face told me none of these things. She said, pointing to the corner just behind the armchair seen in my sketch, that "that was the very spot where Little Dorrit and Maggy had spent the night.'