that has accumulated about it in the way of cartloads of papers (or must pay for them without having them, which is the usual course, for nobody wants them) and must go down the middle and up again through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions of a witch’s Sabbath.  Equity sends questions to law, law sends questions back to equity; law finds it can’t do this, equity finds it can’t do that; neither can so much as say it can’t do anything, without this solicitor instructing and this counsel appearing for A, and that solicitor instructing and that counsel appearing for B; and so on through the whole alphabet, like the history of the apple pie.  And thus, through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends.  And we can’t get out of the suit on any terms, for we are made parties to it, and must be parties to it, whether we like it or not.  But it won’t do to think of it!  When my great uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, began to think of it, it was the beginning of the end!”

“The Mr. Jarndyce, sir, whose story I have heard?”

He nodded gravely.  “I was his heir, and this was his house, Esther.  When I came here, it was bleak indeed.  He had left the signs of his misery upon it.”

“How changed it must be now!” I said.

“It had been called, before his time, the Peaks.  He gave it its present name and lived here shut up, day and night poring over the wicked heaps of papers in the suit and hoping against hope to disentangle it from its mystification and bring it to a close.  In the meantime, the place became dilapidated, the wind whistled through the cracked walls, the rain fell through the broken roof, the weeds choked the passage to the rotting door.  When I brought what remained of him home here, the brains seemed to me to have been blown out of the house too, it was so shattered and ruined.”

He walked a little to and fro after saying this to himself with a shudder, and then looked at me, and brightened, and came and sat down again with his hands in his pockets.

“I told you this was the growlery, my dear.  Where was I?”

I reminded him, at the hopeful change he had made in Bleak House.

“Bleak House; true.  There is, in that city of London there, some property of ours which is much at this day what Bleak House was then; I say property of ours, meaning of the suit’s, but I ought to call it the property of costs, for costs is the only power on earth that will ever get anything out of it now or will ever know it for anything but an eyesore and a heartsore.  It is a street of perishing blind houses, with their eyes stoned out, without a pane of glass, without so much as a window-frame, with the bare blank shutters tumbling from their hinges and falling asunder, the iron rails peeling away in flakes of rust, the chimneys sinking in, the stone steps to every door (and every door might be death’s door) turning stagnant green, the very crutches on which the ruins are propped decaying.  Although Bleak House was not in Chancery, its master was, and it was stamped with the same seal.  These are the Great Seal’s impressions, my dear, all over England—­the children know them!”