To enter the public establishment of which he was destined to become the patriarch, Mr. William Dorrit had passed through an open outer gate on High street in the Borough, to give Southwark its more familiar name; had crossed a little court-yard, ascended a couple of stone steps, traversed a narrow entry, and been admitted by a string of locked doors into the prison lodge. Here he had waited, as the form and practice of the proceeding required, until his arrival was registered, and the tipstaff, who had kindly guided and guarded his feet to this harbor of refuge from the cares of the world which works for a living, had received a receipt for his safe delivery. Through another door at the rear of the lodge, which was built in the wall of the jail itself, he was conducted to what was to be his home for half the lifetime allotted to mortal man. Before him was the jail court, the aristocratic court, where the pump was; and facing the lofty wall which divided it from the street, the barrack, on the next to the top floor of which he found the shabby room in which the child of the Marshalsea was to be born. Debtors were playing at racket and skittles in the court, and grouped around the entrance to the snuggery or tap-room at the further end of the barrack. There were "the collegian in the dressing gown, who had no coat, the stout greengrocer collegian in the corduroy kneebreeches, who had no cares, the collegian in the seaside slippers, who had no shoes, and the lean clerk collegian in buttonless black, who had no hopes; the man with many children and many burdens, whose failure astonished everybody; the man of no children and large resources, whose failure astonished nobody; the people who were always going out to-morrow, and always putting it off; the slatternly women at the windows, gossiping shrilly, the smudgy children playing noisily; all those people in fine who belong to such a place, not forgetting the nondescript messengers, go-betweens and errand runners, who formed a class by themselves."