The custom of beggary at the prison gate, it may as well be remarked here, was a relic of the ancient prison of the Fleet, to which allusion is made in several of the old English comedies. Leigh Hunt, in his pleasant divagations upon London called "The Town," remarks upon the practice in connection with Ludgate Prison, and, indeed, it was common to all the town jails in which debtors were incarcerated, without municipal provisions for their support. In the last century, as John Timbs tells us, there was additional provision for the relief of the paupers of the prison, in what was known as the "Running Box." In this case a man ran to and fro in the neighboring streets to the prison, shaking a box, and begging passengers to put money into it for the poor prisoners in the Fleet, while on his back he carried a capacious covered basket, to hold such broken victuals as the charitable might choose to spare for him. Hard by the paupers' grating of the Fleet was a grimy and gloomy doorway, heavily framed in stone, which, like the brick of the prison wall, sweated a sort of fungoid scum, originally a rank, unhealthy green in color, but, thanks to London fogs and soft-coal smoke, soon converted into the semblance of a thin glaze or varnish of liquid soot. The door stone was worn as smooth as glass, and even in the fairest weather was perilously greased with street slime. On either panel of the doorway was carved a huge numerical figure. The rude wit of the town called this the "Fleet Halter," which, once it was about a man's neck, held him almost as tight and fast as its rival noose at Tyburn. Fastidious debtors who preferred to preserve a fiction of respectability in their correspondence, were wont to have their letters addressed to them at 9 Fleet Market, for 9 was the halter-hinting number of the gateway to the gaol. It was through this gateway that the tipstaff preceded Mr. Pickwick, as you may read in chapter xii. of the second volume which chronicles that immortal gentleman's adventures, "looking over his shoulder to see that his charge was following close at his heels;" and in the gate-lodge, which they entered through a door at the left, Mr. Pickwick sat for his portrait to the assembled turnkeys, so that he might be remembered should he take the fancy to stroll out of the doors without a license. There was in this lodge "a heavy gate guarded by a stout turnkey with the key in his hand," and when Mr. Pickwick's likeness was completed, he passed through this inner gate, and down a short flight of steps, and "found himself, for the first time in his life, within the walls of a debtor's prison."