existence that crawls in and out of gaps in walls and boards; and coils itself to sleep, in maggot numbers, where the rain drips in; and comes and goes, fetching and carrying fever and sowing more evil in its every footprint than Lord Coodle, and Sir Thomas Doodle, and the Duke of Foodle, and all the fine gentlemen in office, down to Zoodle, shall set right in five hundred years—­though born expressly to do it.

Twice lately there has been a crash and a cloud of dust, like the springing of a mine, in Tom-all-Alone’s; and each time a house has fallen.  These accidents have made a paragraph in the newspapers and have filled a bed or two in the nearest hospital.  The gaps remain, and there are not unpopular lodgings among the rubbish.  As several more houses are nearly ready to go, the next crash in Tom-all-Alone’s may be expected to be a good one.

This desirable property is in Chancery, of course.  It would be an insult to the discernment of any man with half an eye to tell him so.  Whether “Tom” is the popular representative of the original plaintiff or defendant in Jarndyce and Jarndyce, or whether Tom lived here when the suit had laid the street waste, all alone, until other settlers came to join him, or whether the traditional title is a comprehensive name for a retreat cut off from honest company and put out of the pale of hope, perhaps nobody knows.  Certainly Jo don’t know.

“For I don’t,” says Jo, “I don’t know nothink.”

It must be a strange state to be like Jo!  To shuffle through the streets, unfamiliar with the shapes, and in utter darkness as to the meaning, of those mysterious symbols, so abundant over the shops, and at the corners of streets, and on the doors, and in the windows!  To see people read, and to see people write, and to see the postmen deliver letters, and not to have the least idea of all that language—­to be, to every scrap of it, stone blind and dumb!  It must be very puzzling to see the good company going to the churches on Sundays, with their books in their hands, and to think (for perhaps Jo does think at odd times) what does it all mean, and if it means anything to anybody, how comes it that it means nothing to me?  To be hustled, and jostled, and moved on; and really to feel that it would appear to be perfectly true that I have no business here, or there, or anywhere; and yet to be perplexed by the consideration that I am here somehow, too, and everybody overlooked me until I became the creature that I am!  It must be a strange state, not merely to be told that I am scarcely human (as in the case of my offering myself for a witness), but to feel it of my own knowledge all my life!  To see the horses, dogs, and cattle go by me and to know that in ignorance I belong to them and not to the superior beings in my shape, whose delicacy I offend!  Jo’s ideas of a criminal trial, or a judge, or a bishop, or a government, or that inestimable jewel to him (if he only knew it) the Constitution, should be strange!  His whole material and immaterial life is wonderfully strange; his death, the strangest thing of all.