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The Child of the Marshalsea.
The baby whose first draught of air had been tinctured with Doctor Haggage's brandy, was handed down among the generations of collegians, like the tradition of their common parent.

In the earlier stages of her existence, she was handed down in a literal and prosaic sense; it being almost a part of the entrance footing of every new collegian to nurse the child who had been born in the college.
'By rights,' remarked the turnkey when she was first shown to him, 'I ought to be her godfather.' The debtor irresolutely thought of it for a minute, and said, 'Perhaps you wouldn't object to really being her godfather ?' 'Oh! _I_ don't object,' replied the turnkey, 'if you don't.' Thus it came to pass that she was christened one Sunday afternoon, when the turnkey, being relieved, was off the lock; and that the turnkey went up to the font of Saint George's Church, and promised and vowed and renounced on her behalf, as he himself related when he came back, 'like a good 'un.' This invested the turnkey with a new proprietary share in the child, over and above his former official one.

When she began to walk and talk, he became fond of her; bought a little arm-chair and stood it by the high fender of the lodge fire-place; liked to have her company when he was on the lock; and used to bribe her with cheap toys to come and talk to him.

The child, for her part, soon grew so fond of the turnkey that she would come climbing up the lodge-steps of her own accord at all hours of the day.