This was the signal for another uproar, the tailor shrieking that John Paul must take off the suit, and Banks the livery; asking the man in the corner by the sea-chests (who proved to be the landlord) who was to pay him for his work and his lost cloth.  And the landlord shook his fist at us and shouted back, who was to pay him his four pounds odd, which included two ten-shilling dinners and a flask of his best wine?  The other tradesmen seized what was theirs and made off with remarks appropriate to the occasion.  And when John Paul and my man were divested of their plumes, we were marched downstairs and out through a jeering line of people to a hackney coach.

“Now, sirs, whereaway?” said the bailiff when we were got in beside one of his men, and burning with the shame of it; “to the prison?  Or I has a very pleasant hotel for gentlemen in Castle Yard.”

The frightful stories my dear grandfather had told me of the Fleet came flooding into my head, and I shuddered and turned sick.  I glanced at John Paul.

“A guinea will not go far in a sponging-house,” said he, and the bailiff’s man laughed.

The bailiff gave a direction we did not hear, and we drove off.  He proved a bluff fellow with a bloat yet not unkindly humour, and despite his calling seemed to have something that was human in him.  He passed many a joke on that pitiful journey in an attempt to break our despondency, urging us not to be downcast, and reminding us that the last gentleman he had taken from Pall Mall was in over a thousand pounds, and that our amount was a bagatelle.  And when we had gone through Temple Bar, instead of keeping on down Fleet Street, we jolted into Chancery Lane.  This roused me.

“My friend has warned you that he has no money,” I said, “and no more have I.”

The bailiff regarded me shrewdly.

“Ay,” he replied, “I know.  But I has seen many stripes o’ men in my time, my masters, and I know them to trust, and them whose silver I must feel or send to the Fleet.”

I told him unreservedly my case, and that he must take his chance of being paid; that I could not hear from America for three months at least.  He listened without much show of attention, shaking his head from side to side.

“If you ever cheated a man, or the admiral here either, then I begin over again,” he broke in with decision; “it is the fine sparks from the clubs I has to watch.  You’ll not worry, sir, about me.  Take my oath I’ll get interest out of you on my money.”

Unwilling as we both were to be beholden to a bailiff, the alternative of the Fleet was too terrible to be thought of.  And so we alighted after him with a shiver at the sight of the ugly, grimy face of the house, and the dirty windows all barred with double iron.  In answer to a knock we were presently admitted by a turnkey to a vestibule as black as a tomb, and the heavy outer door was locked behind us.  Then, as the man cursed and groped for the keyhole of the inner door, despair laid hold of me.