"With such an omen, it is even more necessary than usual that I should be there before the Chancellor comes in," said she, "for he might mention my case the first thing. I have a presentiment that he _will_ mention it the first thing this morning." She stopped to tell us, in a whisper, as we were going down, that the whole house was filled with strange lumber which her landlord had bought piecemeal, and had no wish to sell--in consequence of being a little--M--. This was on the first floor. But she had made a previous stoppage on the second floor, and had silently pointed at a dark door there. "The only other lodger," she now whispered, in explanation; "a law-writer. The children in the lanes here say he has sold himself to the devil. I don't know what he can have done with the money. Hush!" She appeared to mistrust that the lodger might hear her, even there; and repeating "Hush!" went before us on tiptoe, as though even the sound of her footsteps might reveal to him what she had said. Passing through the shop on our way out, as we had passed through it on our way in, we found the old man storing a quantity of packets of waste paper, in a kind of well in the floor. He seemed to be working hard, with the perspiration standing on his forehead, and had a piece of chalk by him; with which, as he put each separate package or bundle down, he made a crooked mark on the paneling of the wall. Richard and Ada, and Miss Jellyby, and the little old lady had gone by him, and I was going, when he touched me on the arm to stay me, and chalked the letter _J_ upon the wall--in a very curious manner, beginning with the end of the letter and shaping it backward. It was a capital letter, not a printed one, but just such a letter as any clerk in Messrs. Kenge and Carboy's office would have made. "Can you read it?" he asked me, with a keen glance. "Surely," said I. "It's very plain." "What is it?" "J." With another glance at me, and a glance at the door, he rubbed it out, and turned an _a_ in its place (not a capital letter this time), and said, "What's that?" I told him. He then rubbed that out, and turned the letter _r_, and asked me the same question. He went on quickly, until he had formed, in the same curious manner, beginning at the ends and bottoms of the letters, the word JARNDYCE, without once leaving two letters on the wall together. "What does that spell?" he asked me. When I told him, he laughed. In the same odd way, yet with the same rapidity, he then produced singly, and rubbed out singly, the letters forming the words BLEAK HOUSE. These, in some astonishment, I also read; and he laughed again. "Hi!" said the old man, laying aside the chalk, "I have a turn for copying from memory, you see, miss, though I can neither read nor write." [Illustration: THE LORD CHANCELLOR COPIES FROM MEMORY.]