Nominally, each prisoner in the Fleet on the Warden Side was entitled to a room at the charge of 1s. 3d. a week. Actually, however, he never got one on any floor above the level of Bartholomew Fair. Each room was made to quarter from two to four tenants in the space designed for one, so that it, at full seasons, actually produced at least a crown a week rental. This system, which was excused on the plea of overcrowding of the jail by commitments of the courts, was called "chummage," and the system produced another curious practice of prison life. If one or more prisoners occupied a room and another was "chummed" on them, they could buy him off by paying him a few shillings a week, and so keep the room to themselves. He, out of the money they paid him, paid in his turn for inferior quarters elsewhere. Thus, a prisoner who was willing to pay full rent for a room to the warden, and buy off anyone who might be chummed upon him, could have a dirty box of a chamber to himself, at the average cost of a first-class parlor and bedroom outside the walls. Prisoners who had been a certain number of years in the jail had a prescriptive right to a room to themselves, and most of these rented their apartments at good rates to new comers, and took beds for themselves in the common lodgings. When Mr. Pickwick entered the Fleet as a resident (vide volume II, chapter xiv) he was chummed on "27 in the third," whose door was to be distinguished by the likeness of a man being hung and smoking a pipe the while, done in chalk upon the panel. Not liking his company of three here he, as may be recalled, rented the room of a chancery prisoner, in which he settled down. For the use of this room he paid L1 a week, and for the furniture, which he hired from a keeper, L1 3s. more. These figures may serve as an indication of the rates prevailing in the Fleet fifteen years before it was demolished. The episode of Mr. Pickwick's investigatory experiences in this connection is worth quoting, as a part of the panorama of prison life. There was only one man in the room upon which he was chummed, and he "was leaning out of the window as far as he could without overbalancing himself, endeavoring, with great perseverance, to spit upon the crown of the hat of a personal friend upon the parade below." He expressed his disgust at having had the newcomer chummed upon him, and summoned his two room-mates, who were a bankrupt butcher and a drunken chaplain out of orders, the expectoratory gentleman himself being a professional blackleg. "'It's an aggravating thing, just as we got the beds so snug,' said the chaplain, looking at the dirty mattresses, each rolled up in a blanket, which occupied one corner of the room during the day, and formed a kind of slab on which were placed an old cracked basin, ewer and soap-dish of common yellow earthenware with a blue flower; 'very aggravating.' "Mr. Martin (the butcher) expressed the same opinion, in rather stronger terms.