Mr. Micawber was a stoutish, middle-aged person, in a brown surtout, with no more hair upon his head than there is upon an egg, and with a very extensive face.  His clothes were shabby, but he wore an imposing shirt-collar.  He carried a jaunty sort of a stick, with a large pair of rusty tassels to it; and an eyeglass hung outside his coat—­for ornament, I afterwards found, as he very seldom looked through it, and couldn’t see anything when he did.

Arrived at his house in Windsor Terrace—­which, I noticed, was shabby, like himself, but also, like himself, made all the show it could—­he presented me to Mrs. Micawber, a thin and faded lady, not at all young.

“I never thought,” said Mrs. Micawber, as she showed me my room at the top of the house at the back, “before I was married that I should ever find it necessary to take a lodger.  But Mr. Micawber being in difficulties, all considerations of private feeling must give way.”

I said, “Yes, ma’am.”

“Mr. Micawber’s difficulties are almost overwhelming just at present,” said Mrs. Micawber, “and whether it is possible to bring him through them I don’t know.  If Mr. Micawber’s creditors will not give him time, they must take the consequences.”

In my forlorn state, I soon became quite attached to this family, and when Mr. Micawber’s difficulties came to a crisis, and he was arrested and carried to the King’s Bench Prison in the Borough, and Mrs. Micawber shortly afterwards followed him, I hired a little room in the neighbourhood of that institution.

Mr. Micawber was in due time released under the Insolvent Debtors’ Act, and it was decided that he should go down to Plymouth, where Mrs. Micawber held that her family had influence.

My own mind was now made up.  I had resolved to run away—­to go by some means or other down into the country, to the only relation I had in the world, and tell my story to my aunt, Miss Betsey.  I knew from Peggotty that Miss Betsey lived near Dover, but whether at Dover itself, at Hythe, Sandgate, or Folkstone, she could not say.  One of our men, however, informing me on my asking him about these places that they were all close together, I deemed this enough for my object; and after seeing the Micawbers off at the coach office, I set off.

III.—­My Aunt Provides for Me

It was on the sixth day of my flight that I reached the wide downs near
Dover and set foot in the town.

I had walked every step of the way, sleeping under haystacks at night.  Fortunately, it was summer weather, for I was obliged to part with coat and waistcoat to buy food.  My shoes were in a woeful condition, and my hat—­which had served me for a nightcap, too—­was so crushed and bent that no old battered saucepan on the dunghill need have been ashamed to vie with it.  My shirt and trousers, stained with heat, dew, grass, and the Kentish soil on which I had slept, might have frightened the birds from my aunt’s garden as I stood at the gate.  My hair had known no comb or brush since I left London.  In this plight I waited to introduce myself to my formidable aunt.