A New Lodger

The long vacation saunters on towards term-time like an idle river
very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea. Mr. Guppy
saunters along with it congenially. He has blunted the blade of his
penknife and broken the point off by sticking that instrument into
his desk in every direction. Not that he bears the desk any ill will,
but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting
nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual
energies under too heavy contribution. He finds that nothing agrees
with him so well as to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool,
and stab his desk, and gape.

Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken
out a shooting license and gone down to his father's, and Mr. Guppy's
two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave. Mr. Guppy and Mr. Richard
Carstone divide the dignity of the office. But Mr. Carstone is for
the time being established in Kenge's room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes.
So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the
confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce
in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good
enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming,
he would have got it painted.

Mr. Guppy suspects everybody who enters on the occupation of a stool
in Kenge and Carboy's office of entertaining, as a matter of course,
sinister designs upon him. He is clear that every such person wants
to depose him. If he be ever asked how, why, when, or wherefore, he
shuts up one eye and shakes his head. On the strength of these
profound views, he in the most ingenious manner takes infinite pains
to counterplot when there is no plot, and plays the deepest games of
chess without any adversary.

It is a source of much gratification to Mr. Guppy, therefore, to find
the new-comer constantly poring over the papers in Jarndyce and
Jarndyce, for he well knows that nothing but confusion and failure
can come of that. His satisfaction communicates itself to a third
saunterer through the long vacation in Kenge and Carboy's office, to
wit, Young Smallweed.

Whether Young Smallweed (metaphorically called Small and eke Chick
Weed, as it were jocularly to express a fledgling) was ever a boy is
much doubted in Lincoln's Inn. He is now something under fifteen and
an old limb of the law. He is facetiously understood to entertain a
passion for a lady at a cigar-shop in the neighbourhood of Chancery
Lane and for her sake to have broken off a contract with another
lady, to whom he had been engaged some years. He is a town-made
article, of small stature and weazen features, but may be perceived
from a considerable distance by means of his very tall hat. To become
a Guppy is the object of his ambition. He dresses at that gentleman
(by whom he is patronized), talks at him, walks at him, founds
himself entirely on him. He is honoured with Mr. Guppy's particular
confidence and occasionally advises him, from the deep wells of his
experience, on difficult points in private life.

Mr. Guppy has been lolling out of window all the morning after trying
all the stools in succession and finding none of them easy, and after
several times putting his head into the iron safe with a notion of
cooling it. Mr. Smallweed has been twice dispatched for effervescent
drinks, and has twice mixed them in the two official tumblers and
stirred them up with the ruler. Mr. Guppy propounds for Mr.
Smallweed's consideration the paradox that the more you drink the
thirstier you are and reclines his head upon the window-sill in a
state of hopeless languor.

While thus looking out into the shade of Old Square, Lincoln's Inn,
surveying the intolerable bricks and mortar, Mr. Guppy becomes
conscious of a manly whisker emerging from the cloistered walk below
and turning itself up in the direction of his face. At the same time,
a low whistle is wafted through the Inn and a suppressed voice cries,
"Hip! Gup-py!"

"Why, you don't mean it!" says Mr. Guppy, aroused. "Small! Here's
Jobling!" Small's head looks out of window too and nods to Jobling.

"Where have you sprung up from?" inquires Mr. Guppy.

"From the market-gardens down by Deptford. I can't stand it any
longer. I must enlist. I say! I wish you'd lend me half a crown. Upon
my soul, I'm hungry."

Jobling looks hungry and also has the appearance of having run to
seed in the market-gardens down by Deptford.

"I say! Just throw out half a crown if you have got one to spare. I
want to get some dinner."

"Will you come and dine with me?" says Mr. Guppy, throwing out the
coin, which Mr. Jobling catches neatly.

"How long should I have to hold out?" says Jobling.

"Not half an hour. I am only waiting here till the enemy goes,
returns Mr. Guppy, butting inward with his head.

"What enemy?"

"A new one. Going to be articled. Will you wait?"

"Can you give a fellow anything to read in the meantime?" says Mr.
Jobling.

Smallweed suggests the law list. But Mr. Jobling declares with much
earnestness that he "can't stand it."

"You shall have the paper," says Mr. Guppy. "He shall bring it down.
But you had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and
read. It's a quiet place."

Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed
supplies him with the newspaper and occasionally drops his eye upon
him from the landing as a precaution against his becoming disgusted
with waiting and making an untimely departure. At last the enemy
retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr. Jobling up.

"Well, and how are you?" says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.

"So, so. How are you?"

Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling
ventures on the question, "How is SHE?" This Mr. Guppy resents as a
liberty, retorting, "Jobling, there ARE chords in the human mind--"
Jobling begs pardon.

"Any subject but that!" says Mr. Guppy with a gloomy enjoyment of his
injury. "For there ARE chords, Jobling--"

Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.

During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the
dinner party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper,
"Return immediately." This notification to all whom it may concern,
he inserts in the letter-box, and then putting on the tall hat at the
angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy wears his, informs his patron
that they may now make themselves scarce.

Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, of
the class known among its frequenters by the denomination slap-bang,
where the waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed to
have made some impression on the susceptible Smallweed, of whom it
may be remarked that he is a weird changeling to whom years are
nothing. He stands precociously possessed of centuries of owlish
wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must have lain
there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has Smallweed; and he
drinks and smokes in a monkeyish way; and his neck is stiff in his
collar; and he is never to be taken in; and he knows all about it,
whatever it is. In short, in his bringing up he has been so nursed by
Law and Equity that he has become a kind of fossil imp, to account
for whose terrestrial existence it is reported at the public offices
that his father was John Doe and his mother the only female member of
the Roe family, also that his first long-clothes were made from a
blue bag.

Into the dining-house, unaffected by the seductive show in the window
of artificially whitened cauliflowers and poultry, verdant baskets of
peas, coolly blooming cucumbers, and joints ready for the spit, Mr.
Smallweed leads the way. They know him there and defer to him. He has
his favourite box, he bespeaks all the papers, he is down upon bald
patriarchs, who keep them more than ten minutes afterwards. It is of
no use trying him with anything less than a full-sized "bread" or
proposing to him any joint in cut unless it is in the very best cut.
In the matter of gravy he is adamant.

Conscious of his elfin power and submitting to his dread experience,
Mr. Guppy consults him in the choice of that day's banquet, turning
an appealing look towards him as the waitress repeats the catalogue
of viands and saying "What do YOU take, Chick?" Chick, out of the
profundity of his artfulness, preferring "veal and ham and French
beans--and don't you forget the stuffing, Polly" (with an unearthly
cock of his venerable eye), Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling give the like
order. Three pint pots of half-and-half are superadded. Quickly the
waitress returns bearing what is apparently a model of the Tower of
Babel but what is really a pile of plates and flat tin dish-covers.
Mr. Smallweed, approving of what is set before him, conveys
intelligent benignity into his ancient eye and winks upon her. Then,
amid a constant coming in, and going out, and running about, and a
clatter of crockery, and a rumbling up and down of the machine which
brings the nice cuts from the kitchen, and a shrill crying for more
nice cuts down the speaking-pipe, and a shrill reckoning of the cost
of nice cuts that have been disposed of, and a general flush and
steam of hot joints, cut and uncut, and a considerably heated
atmosphere in which the soiled knives and tablecloths seem to break
out spontaneously into eruptions of grease and blotches of beer, the
legal triumvirate appease their appetites.

Mr. Jobling is buttoned up closer than mere adornment might require.
His hat presents at the rims a peculiar appearance of a glistening
nature, as if it had been a favourite snail-promenade. The same
phenomenon is visible on some parts of his coat, and particularly at
the seams. He has the faded appearance of a gentleman in embarrassed
circumstances; even his light whiskers droop with something of a
shabby air.

His appetite is so vigorous that it suggests spare living for some
little time back. He makes such a speedy end of his plate of veal and
ham, bringing it to a close while his companions are yet midway in
theirs, that Mr. Guppy proposes another. "Thank you, Guppy," says Mr.
Jobling, "I really don't know but what I WILL take another."

Another being brought, he falls to with great goodwill.

Mr. Guppy takes silent notice of him at intervals until he is half
way through this second plate and stops to take an enjoying pull at
his pint pot of half-and-half (also renewed) and stretches out his
legs and rubs his hands. Beholding him in which glow of contentment,
Mr. Guppy says, "You are a man again, Tony!"

"Well, not quite yet," says Mr. Jobling. "Say, just born."

"Will you take any other vegetables? Grass? Peas? Summer cabbage?"

"Thank you, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling. "I really don't know but what I
WILL take summer cabbage."

Order given; with the sarcastic addition (from Mr. Smallweed) of
"Without slugs, Polly!" And cabbage produced.

"I am growing up, Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, plying his knife and fork
with a relishing steadiness.

"Glad to hear it."

"In fact, I have just turned into my teens," says Mr. Jobling.

He says no more until he has performed his task, which he achieves as
Messrs. Guppy and Smallweed finish theirs, thus getting over the
ground in excellent style and beating those two gentlemen easily by a
veal and ham and a cabbage.

"Now, Small," says Mr. Guppy, "what would you recommend about
pastry?"

"Marrow puddings," says Mr. Smallweed instantly.

"Aye, aye!" cries Mr. Jobling with an arch look. "You're there, are
you? Thank you, Mr. Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take a marrow
pudding."

Three marrow puddings being produced, Mr. Jobling adds in a pleasant
humour that he is coming of age fast. To these succeed, by command of
Mr. Smallweed, "three Cheshires," and to those "three small rums."
This apex of the entertainment happily reached, Mr. Jobling puts up
his legs on the carpeted seat (having his own side of the box to
himself), leans against the wall, and says, "I am grown up now,
Guppy. I have arrived at maturity."

"What do you think, now," says Mr. Guppy, "about--you don't mind
Smallweed?"

"Not the least in the world. I have the pleasure of drinking his good
health."

"Sir, to you!" says Mr. Smallweed.

"I was saying, what do you think NOW," pursues Mr. Guppy, "of
enlisting?"

"Why, what I may think after dinner," returns Mr. Jobling, "is one
thing, my dear Guppy, and what I may think before dinner is another
thing. Still, even after dinner, I ask myself the question, What am I
to do? How am I to live? Ill fo manger, you know," says Mr. Jobling,
pronouncing that word as if he meant a necessary fixture in an
English stable. "Ill fo manger. That's the French saying, and
mangering is as necessary to me as it is to a Frenchman. Or more so."

Mr. Smallweed is decidedly of opinion "much more so."

"If any man had told me," pursues Jobling, "even so lately as when
you and I had the frisk down in Lincolnshire, Guppy, and drove over
to see that house at Castle Wold--"

Mr. Smallweed corrects him--Chesney Wold.

"Chesney Wold. (I thank my honourable friend for that cheer.) If any
man had told me then that I should be as hard up at the present time
as I literally find myself, I should have--well, I should have
pitched into him," says Mr. Jobling, taking a little rum-and-water
with an air of desperate resignation; "I should have let fly at his
head."

"Still, Tony, you were on the wrong side of the post then,"
remonstrates Mr. Guppy. "You were talking about nothing else in the
gig."

"Guppy," says Mr. Jobling, "I will not deny it. I was on the wrong
side of the post. But I trusted to things coming round."

That very popular trust in flat things coming round! Not in their
being beaten round, or worked round, but in their "coming" round! As
though a lunatic should trust in the world's "coming" triangular!

"I had confident expectations that things would come round and be all
square," says Mr. Jobling with some vagueness of expression and
perhaps of meaning too. "But I was disappointed. They never did. And
when it came to creditors making rows at the office and to people
that the office dealt with making complaints about dirty trifles of
borrowed money, why there was an end of that connexion. And of any
new professional connexion too, for if I was to give a reference
to-morrow, it would be mentioned and would sew me up. Then what's a
fellow to do? I have been keeping out of the way and living cheap
down about the market-gardens, but what's the use of living cheap
when you have got no money? You might as well live dear."

"Better," Mr. Smallweed thinks.

"Certainly. It's the fashionable way; and fashion and whiskers have
been my weaknesses, and I don't care who knows it," says Mr. Jobling.
"They are great weaknesses--Damme, sir, they are great. Well,"
proceeds Mr. Jobling after a defiant visit to his rum-and-water,
"what can a fellow do, I ask you, BUT enlist?"

Mr. Guppy comes more fully into the conversation to state what, in
his opinion, a fellow can do. His manner is the gravely impressive
manner of a man who has not committed himself in life otherwise than
as he has become the victim of a tender sorrow of the heart.

"Jobling," says Mr. Guppy, "myself and our mutual friend Smallweed--"

Mr. Smallweed modestly observes, "Gentlemen both!" and drinks.

"--Have had a little conversation on this matter more than once since
you--"

"Say, got the sack!" cries Mr. Jobling bitterly. "Say it, Guppy. You
mean it."

"No-o-o! Left the Inn," Mr. Smallweed delicately suggests.

"Since you left the Inn, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy; "and I have
mentioned to our mutual friend Smallweed a plan I have lately thought
of proposing. You know Snagsby the stationer?"

"I know there is such a stationer," returns Mr. Jobling. "He was not
ours, and I am not acquainted with him."

"He IS ours, Jobling, and I AM acquainted with him," Mr. Guppy
retorts. "Well, sir! I have lately become better acquainted with him
through some accidental circumstances that have made me a visitor of
his in private life. Those circumstances it is not necessary to offer
in argument. They may--or they may not--have some reference to a
subject which may--or may not--have cast its shadow on my existence."

As it is Mr. Guppy's perplexing way with boastful misery to tempt his
particular friends into this subject, and the moment they touch it,
to turn on them with that trenchant severity about the chords in the
human mind, both Mr. Jobling and Mr. Smallweed decline the pitfall by
remaining silent.

"Such things may be," repeats Mr. Guppy, "or they may not be. They
are no part of the case. It is enough to mention that both Mr. and
Mrs. Snagsby are very willing to oblige me and that Snagsby has, in
busy times, a good deal of copying work to give out. He has all
Tulkinghorn's, and an excellent business besides. I believe if our
mutual friend Smallweed were put into the box, he could prove this?"

Mr. Smallweed nods and appears greedy to be sworn.

"Now, gentlemen of the jury," says Mr. Guppy, "--I mean, now,
Jobling--you may say this is a poor prospect of a living. Granted.
But it's better than nothing, and better than enlistment. You want
time. There must be time for these late affairs to blow over. You
might live through it on much worse terms than by writing for
Snagsby."

Mr. Jobling is about to interrupt when the sagacious Smallweed checks
him with a dry cough and the words, "Hem! Shakspeare!"

"There are two branches to this subject, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy.
"That is the first. I come to the second. You know Krook, the
Chancellor, across the lane. Come, Jobling," says Mr. Guppy in his
encouraging cross-examination-tone, "I think you know Krook, the
Chancellor, across the lane?"

"I know him by sight," says Mr. Jobling.

"You know him by sight. Very well. And you know little Flite?"

"Everybody knows her," says Mr. Jobling.

"Everybody knows her. VERY well. Now it has been one of my duties of
late to pay Flite a certain weekly allowance, deducting from it the
amount of her weekly rent, which I have paid (in consequence of
instructions I have received) to Krook himself, regularly in her
presence. This has brought me into communication with Krook and into
a knowledge of his house and his habits. I know he has a room to let.
You may live there at a very low charge under any name you like, as
quietly as if you were a hundred miles off. He'll ask no questions
and would accept you as a tenant at a word from me--before the clock
strikes, if you chose. And I tell you another thing, Jobling," says
Mr. Guppy, who has suddenly lowered his voice and become familiar
again, "he's an extraordinary old chap--always rummaging among a
litter of papers and grubbing away at teaching himself to read and
write, without getting on a bit, as it seems to me. He is a most
extraordinary old chap, sir. I don't know but what it might be worth
a fellow's while to look him up a bit."

"You don't mean--" Mr. Jobling begins.

"I mean," returns Mr. Guppy, shrugging his shoulders with becoming
modesty, "that I can't make him out. I appeal to our mutual friend
Smallweed whether he has or has not heard me remark that I can't make
him out."

Mr. Smallweed bears the concise testimony, "A few!"

"I have seen something of the profession and something of life,
Tony," says Mr. Guppy, "and it's seldom I can't make a man out, more
or less. But such an old card as this, so deep, so sly, and secret
(though I don't believe he is ever sober), I never came across. Now,
he must be precious old, you know, and he has not a soul about him,
and he is reported to be immensely rich; and whether he is a
smuggler, or a receiver, or an unlicensed pawnbroker, or a
money-lender--all of which I have thought likely at different
times--it might pay you to knock up a sort of knowledge of him. I
don't see why you shouldn't go in for it, when everything else
suits."

Mr. Jobling, Mr. Guppy, and Mr. Smallweed all lean their elbows on
the table and their chins upon their hands, and look at the ceiling.
After a time, they all drink, slowly lean back, put their hands in
their pockets, and look at one another.

"If I had the energy I once possessed, Tony!" says Mr. Guppy with a
sigh. "But there are chords in the human mind--"

Expressing the remainder of the desolate sentiment in rum-and-water,
Mr. Guppy concludes by resigning the adventure to Tony Jobling and
informing him that during the vacation and while things are slack,
his purse, "as far as three or four or even five pound goes," will be
at his disposal. "For never shall it be said," Mr. Guppy adds with
emphasis, "that William Guppy turned his back upon his friend!"

The latter part of the proposal is so directly to the purpose that
Mr. Jobling says with emotion, "Guppy, my trump, your fist!" Mr.
Guppy presents it, saying, "Jobling, my boy, there it is!" Mr.
Jobling returns, "Guppy, we have been pals now for some years!" Mr.
Guppy replies, "Jobling, we have."

They then shake hands, and Mr. Jobling adds in a feeling manner,
"Thank you, Guppy, I don't know but what I WILL take another glass
for old acquaintance sake."

"Krook's last lodger died there," observes Mr. Guppy in an incidental
way.

"Did he though!" says Mr. Jobling.

"There was a verdict. Accidental death. You don't mind that?"

"No," says Mr. Jobling, "I don't mind it; but he might as well have
died somewhere else. It's devilish odd that he need go and die at MY
place!" Mr. Jobling quite resents this liberty, several times
returning to it with such remarks as, "There are places enough to die
in, I should think!" or, "He wouldn't have liked my dying at HIS
place, I dare say!"

However, the compact being virtually made, Mr. Guppy proposes to
dispatch the trusty Smallweed to ascertain if Mr. Krook is at home,
as in that case they may complete the negotiation without delay. Mr.
Jobling approving, Smallweed puts himself under the tall hat and
conveys it out of the dining-rooms in the Guppy manner. He soon
returns with the intelligence that Mr. Krook is at home and that he
has seen him through the shop-door, sitting in the back premises,
sleeping "like one o'clock."

"Then I'll pay," says Mr. Guppy, "and we'll go and see him. Small,
what will it be?"

Mr. Smallweed, compelling the attendance of the waitress with one
hitch of his eyelash, instantly replies as follows: "Four veals and
hams is three, and four potatoes is three and four, and one summer
cabbage is three and six, and three marrows is four and six, and six
breads is five, and three Cheshires is five and three, and four
half-pints of half-and-half is six and three, and four small rums is
eight and three, and three Pollys is eight and six. Eight and six in
half a sovereign, Polly, and eighteenpence out!"

Not at all excited by these stupendous calculations, Smallweed
dismisses his friends with a cool nod and remains behind to take a
little admiring notice of Polly, as opportunity may serve, and to
read the daily papers, which are so very large in proportion to
himself, shorn of his hat, that when he holds up the Times to run his
eye over the columns, he seems to have retired for the night and to
have disappeared under the bedclothes.

Mr. Guppy and Mr. Jobling repair to the rag and bottle shop, where
they find Krook still sleeping like one o'clock, that is to say,
breathing stertorously with his chin upon his breast and quite
insensible to any external sounds or even to gentle shaking. On the
table beside him, among the usual lumber, stand an empty gin-bottle
and a glass. The unwholesome air is so stained with this liquor that
even the green eyes of the cat upon her shelf, as they open and shut
and glimmer on the visitors, look drunk.

"Hold up here!" says Mr. Guppy, giving the relaxed figure of the old
man another shake. "Mr. Krook! Halloa, sir!"

But it would seem as easy to wake a bundle of old clothes with a
spirituous heat smouldering in it. "Did you ever see such a stupor as
he falls into, between drink and sleep?" says Mr. Guppy.

"If this is his regular sleep," returns Jobling, rather alarmed,
"it'll last a long time one of these days, I am thinking."

"It's always more like a fit than a nap," says Mr. Guppy, shaking him
again. "Halloa, your lordship! Why, he might be robbed fifty times
over! Open your eyes!"

After much ado, he opens them, but without appearing to see his
visitors or any other objects. Though he crosses one leg on another,
and folds his hands, and several times closes and opens his parched
lips, he seems to all intents and purposes as insensible as before.

"He is alive, at any rate," says Mr. Guppy. "How are you, my Lord
Chancellor. I have brought a friend of mine, sir, on a little matter
of business."

The old man still sits, often smacking his dry lips without the least
consciousness. After some minutes he makes an attempt to rise. They
help him up, and he staggers against the wall and stares at them.

"How do you do, Mr. Krook?" says Mr. Guppy in some discomfiture. "How
do you do, sir? You are looking charming, Mr. Krook. I hope you are
pretty well?"

The old man, in aiming a purposeless blow at Mr. Guppy, or at
nothing, feebly swings himself round and comes with his face against
the wall. So he remains for a minute or two, heaped up against it,
and then staggers down the shop to the front door. The air, the
movement in the court, the lapse of time, or the combination of these
things recovers him. He comes back pretty steadily, adjusting his fur
cap on his head and looking keenly at them.

"Your servant, gentlemen; I've been dozing. Hi! I am hard to wake,
odd times."

"Rather so, indeed, sir," responds Mr. Guppy.

"What? You've been a-trying to do it, have you?" says the suspicious
Krook.

"Only a little," Mr. Guppy explains.

The old man's eye resting on the empty bottle, he takes it up,
examines it, and slowly tilts it upside down.

"I say!" he cries like the hobgoblin in the story. "Somebody's been
making free here!"

"I assure you we found it so," says Mr. Guppy. "Would you allow me to
get it filled for you?"

"Yes, certainly I would!" cries Krook in high glee. "Certainly I
would! Don't mention it! Get it filled next door--Sol's Arms--the
Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny. Bless you, they know ME!"

He so presses the empty bottle upon Mr. Guppy that that gentleman,
with a nod to his friend, accepts the trust and hurries out and
hurries in again with the bottle filled. The old man receives it in
his arms like a beloved grandchild and pats it tenderly.

"But, I say," he whispers, with his eyes screwed up, after tasting
it, "this ain't the Lord Chancellor's fourteenpenny. This is
eighteenpenny!"

"I thought you might like that better," says Mr. Guppy.

"You're a nobleman, sir," returns Krook with another taste, and his
hot breath seems to come towards them like a flame. "You're a baron
of the land."

Taking advantage of this auspicious moment, Mr. Guppy presents his
friend under the impromptu name of Mr. Weevle and states the object
of their visit. Krook, with his bottle under his arm (he never gets
beyond a certain point of either drunkenness or sobriety), takes time
to survey his proposed lodger and seems to approve of him. "You'd
like to see the room, young man?" he says. "Ah! It's a good room!
Been whitewashed. Been cleaned down with soft soap and soda. Hi! It's
worth twice the rent, letting alone my company when you want it and
such a cat to keep the mice away."

Commending the room after this manner, the old man takes them
upstairs, where indeed they do find it cleaner than it used to be and
also containing some old articles of furniture which he has dug up
from his inexhaustible stores. The terms are easily concluded--for
the Lord Chancellor cannot be hard on Mr. Guppy, associated as he is
with Kenge and Carboy, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, and other famous claims
on his professional consideration--and it is agreed that Mr. Weevle
shall take possession on the morrow. Mr. Weevle and Mr. Guppy then
repair to Cook's Court, Cursitor Street, where the personal
introduction of the former to Mr. Snagsby is effected and (more
important) the vote and interest of Mrs. Snagsby are secured. They
then report progress to the eminent Smallweed, waiting at the office
in his tall hat for that purpose, and separate, Mr. Guppy explaining
that he would terminate his little entertainment by standing treat at
the play but that there are chords in the human mind which would
render it a hollow mockery.

On the morrow, in the dusk of evening, Mr. Weevle modestly appears at
Krook's, by no means incommoded with luggage, and establishes himself
in his new lodging, where the two eyes in the shutters stare at him
in his sleep, as if they were full of wonder. On the following day
Mr. Weevle, who is a handy good-for-nothing kind of young fellow,
borrows a needle and thread of Miss Flite and a hammer of his
landlord and goes to work devising apologies for window-curtains, and
knocking up apologies for shelves, and hanging up his two teacups,
milkpot, and crockery sundries on a pennyworth of little hooks, like
a shipwrecked sailor making the best of it.

But what Mr. Weevle prizes most of all his few possessions (next
after his light whiskers, for which he has an attachment that only
whiskers can awaken in the breast of man) is a choice collection of
copper-plate impressions from that truly national work The Divinities
of Albion, or Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty, representing ladies
of title and fashion in every variety of smirk that art, combined
with capital, is capable of producing. With these magnificent
portraits, unworthily confined in a band-box during his seclusion
among the market-gardens, he decorates his apartment; and as the
Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty wears every variety of fancy dress,
plays every variety of musical instrument, fondles every variety of
dog, ogles every variety of prospect, and is backed up by every
variety of flower-pot and balustrade, the result is very imposing.

But fashion is Mr. Weevle's, as it was Tony Jobling's, weakness. To
borrow yesterday's paper from the Sol's Arms of an evening and read
about the brilliant and distinguished meteors that are shooting
across the fashionable sky in every direction is unspeakable
consolation to him. To know what member of what brilliant and
distinguished circle accomplished the brilliant and distinguished
feat of joining it yesterday or contemplates the no less brilliant
and distinguished feat of leaving it to-morrow gives him a thrill of
joy. To be informed what the Galaxy Gallery of British Beauty is
about, and means to be about, and what Galaxy marriages are on the
tapis, and what Galaxy rumours are in circulation, is to become
acquainted with the most glorious destinies of mankind. Mr. Weevle
reverts from this intelligence to the Galaxy portraits implicated,
and seems to know the originals, and to be known of them.

For the rest he is a quiet lodger, full of handy shifts and devices
as before mentioned, able to cook and clean for himself as well as to
carpenter, and developing social inclinations after the shades of
evening have fallen on the court. At those times, when he is not
visited by Mr. Guppy or by a small light in his likeness quenched in
a dark hat, he comes out of his dull room--where he has inherited the
deal wilderness of desk bespattered with a rain of ink--and talks to
Krook or is "very free," as they call it in the court, commendingly,
with any one disposed for conversation. Wherefore, Mrs. Piper, who
leads the court, is impelled to offer two remarks to Mrs. Perkins:
firstly, that if her Johnny was to have whiskers, she could wish 'em
to be identically like that young man's; and secondly, "Mark my
words, Mrs. Perkins, ma'am, and don't you be surprised, Lord bless
you, if that young man comes in at last for old Krook's money!"

The Smallweed Family

In a rather ill-favoured and ill-savoured neighbourhood, though one
of its rising grounds bears the name of Mount Pleasant, the Elfin
Smallweed, christened Bartholomew and known on the domestic hearth as
Bart, passes that limited portion of his time on which the office and
its contingencies have no claim. He dwells in a little narrow street,
always solitary, shady, and sad, closely bricked in on all sides like
a tomb, but where there yet lingers the stump of an old forest tree
whose flavour is about as fresh and natural as the Smallweed smack of
youth.

There has been only one child in the Smallweed family for several
generations. Little old men and women there have been, but no child,
until Mr. Smallweed's grandmother, now living, became weak in her
intellect and fell (for the first time) into a childish state. With
such infantine graces as a total want of observation, memory,
understanding, and interest, and an eternal disposition to fall
asleep over the fire and into it, Mr. Smallweed's grandmother has
undoubtedly brightened the family.

Mr. Smallweed's grandfather is likewise of the party. He is in a
helpless condition as to his lower, and nearly so as to his upper,
limbs, but his mind is unimpaired. It holds, as well as it ever held,
the first four rules of arithmetic and a certain small collection of
the hardest facts. In respect of ideality, reverence, wonder, and
other such phrenological attributes, it is no worse off than it used
to be. Everything that Mr. Smallweed's grandfather ever put away in
his mind was a grub at first, and is a grub at last. In all his life
he has never bred a single butterfly.

The father of this pleasant grandfather, of the neighbourhood of
Mount Pleasant, was a horny-skinned, two-legged, money-getting
species of spider who spun webs to catch unwary flies and retired
into holes until they were entrapped. The name of this old pagan's
god was Compound Interest. He lived for it, married it, died of it.
Meeting with a heavy loss in an honest little enterprise in which all
the loss was intended to have been on the other side, he broke
something--something necessary to his existence, therefore it
couldn't have been his heart--and made an end of his career. As his
character was not good, and he had been bred at a charity school in a
complete course, according to question and answer, of those ancient
people the Amorites and Hittites, he was frequently quoted as an
example of the failure of education.

His spirit shone through his son, to whom he had always preached of
"going out" early in life and whom he made a clerk in a sharp
scrivener's office at twelve years old. There the young gentleman
improved his mind, which was of a lean and anxious character, and
developing the family gifts, gradually elevated himself into the
discounting profession. Going out early in life and marrying late, as
his father had done before him, he too begat a lean and
anxious-minded son, who in his turn, going out early in life and
marrying late, became the father of Bartholomew and Judith Smallweed,
twins. During the whole time consumed in the slow growth of this
family tree, the house of Smallweed, always early to go out and late
to marry, has strengthened itself in its practical character, has
discarded all amusements, discountenanced all story-books,
fairy-tales, fictions, and fables, and banished all levities
whatsoever. Hence the gratifying fact that it has had no child born
to it and that the complete little men and women whom it has produced
have been observed to bear a likeness to old monkeys with something
depressing on their minds.

At the present time, in the dark little parlour certain feet below
the level of the street--a grim, hard, uncouth parlour, only
ornamented with the coarsest of baize table-covers, and the hardest
of sheet-iron tea-trays, and offering in its decorative character no
bad allegorical representation of Grandfather Smallweed's
mind--seated in two black horsehair porter's chairs, one on each side
of the fire-place, the superannuated Mr. and Mrs. Smallweed while
away the rosy hours. On the stove are a couple of trivets for the
pots and kettles which it is Grandfather Smallweed's usual occupation
to watch, and projecting from the chimney-piece between them is a
sort of brass gallows for roasting, which he also superintends when
it is in action. Under the venerable Mr. Smallweed's seat and guarded
by his spindle legs is a drawer in his chair, reported to contain
property to a fabulous amount. Beside him is a spare cushion with
which he is always provided in order that he may have something to
throw at the venerable partner of his respected age whenever she
makes an allusion to money--a subject on which he is particularly
sensitive.

"And where's Bart?" Grandfather Smallweed inquires of Judy, Bart's
twin sister.

"He an't come in yet," says Judy.

"It's his tea-time, isn't it?"

"No."

"How much do you mean to say it wants then?"

"Ten minutes."

"Hey?"

"Ten minutes." (Loud on the part of Judy.)

"Ho!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Ten minutes."

Grandmother Smallweed, who has been mumbling and shaking her head at
the trivets, hearing figures mentioned, connects them with money and
screeches like a horrible old parrot without any plumage, "Ten
ten-pound notes!"

Grandfather Smallweed immediately throws the cushion at her.

"Drat you, be quiet!" says the good old man.

The effect of this act of jaculation is twofold. It not only doubles
up Mrs. Smallweed's head against the side of her porter's chair and
causes her to present, when extricated by her granddaughter, a highly
unbecoming state of cap, but the necessary exertion recoils on Mr.
Smallweed himself, whom it throws back into HIS porter's chair like a
broken puppet. The excellent old gentleman being at these times a
mere clothes-bag with a black skull-cap on the top of it, does not
present a very animated appearance until he has undergone the two
operations at the hands of his granddaughter of being shaken up like
a great bottle and poked and punched like a great bolster. Some
indication of a neck being developed in him by these means, he and
the sharer of his life's evening again fronting one another in their
two porter's chairs, like a couple of sentinels long forgotten on
their post by the Black Serjeant, Death.

Judy the twin is worthy company for these associates. She is so
indubitably sister to Mr. Smallweed the younger that the two kneaded
into one would hardly make a young person of average proportions,
while she so happily exemplifies the before-mentioned family likeness
to the monkey tribe that attired in a spangled robe and cap she might
walk about the table-land on the top of a barrel-organ without
exciting much remark as an unusual specimen. Under existing
circumstances, however, she is dressed in a plain, spare gown of
brown stuff.

Judy never owned a doll, never heard of Cinderella, never played at
any game. She once or twice fell into children's company when she was
about ten years old, but the children couldn't get on with Judy, and
Judy couldn't get on with them. She seemed like an animal of another
species, and there was instinctive repugnance on both sides. It is
very doubtful whether Judy knows how to laugh. She has so rarely seen
the thing done that the probabilities are strong the other way. Of
anything like a youthful laugh, she certainly can have no conception.
If she were to try one, she would find her teeth in her way,
modelling that action of her face, as she has unconsciously modelled
all its other expressions, on her pattern of sordid age. Such is
Judy.

And her twin brother couldn't wind up a top for his life. He knows no
more of Jack the Giant Killer or of Sinbad the Sailor than he knows
of the people in the stars. He could as soon play at leap-frog or at
cricket as change into a cricket or a frog himself. But he is so much
the better off than his sister that on his narrow world of fact an
opening has dawned into such broader regions as lie within the ken of
Mr. Guppy. Hence his admiration and his emulation of that shining
enchanter.

Judy, with a gong-like clash and clatter, sets one of the sheet-iron
tea-trays on the table and arranges cups and saucers. The bread she
puts on in an iron basket, and the butter (and not much of it) in a
small pewter plate. Grandfather Smallweed looks hard after the tea as
it is served out and asks Judy where the girl is.

"Charley, do you mean?" says Judy.

"Hey?" from Grandfather Smallweed.

"Charley, do you mean?"

This touches a spring in Grandmother Smallweed, who, chuckling as
usual at the trivets, cries, "Over the water! Charley over the water,
Charley over the water, over the water to Charley, Charley over the
water, over the water to Charley!" and becomes quite energetic about
it. Grandfather looks at the cushion but has not sufficiently
recovered his late exertion.

"Ha!" he says when there is silence. "If that's her name. She eats a
deal. It would be better to allow her for her keep."

Judy, with her brother's wink, shakes her head and purses up her
mouth into no without saying it.

"No?" returns the old man. "Why not?"

"She'd want sixpence a day, and we can do it for less," says Judy.

"Sure?"

Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning and calls, as she scrapes
the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste and cuts
it into slices, "You, Charley, where are you?" Timidly obedient to
the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large bonnet, with
her hands covered with soap and water and a scrubbing brush in one of
them, appears, and curtsys.

"What work are you about now?" says Judy, making an ancient snap at
her like a very sharp old beldame.

"I'm a-cleaning the upstairs back room, miss," replies Charley.

"Mind you do it thoroughly, and don't loiter. Shirking won't do for
me. Make haste! Go along!" cries Judy with a stamp upon the ground.
"You girls are more trouble than you're worth, by half."

On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the
butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother,
looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she opens
the street-door.

"Aye, aye, Bart!" says Grandfather Smallweed. "Here you are, hey?"

"Here I am," says Bart.

"Been along with your friend again, Bart?"

Small nods.

"Dining at his expense, Bart?"

Small nods again.

"That's right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take
warning by his foolish example. That's the use of such a friend. The
only use you can put him to," says the venerable sage.

His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully as he
might, honours it with all such acceptance as may lie in a slight
wink and a nod and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces
then hover over teacups like a company of ghastly cherubim, Mrs.
Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and chattering at the
trivets and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be repeatedly shaken up like a
large black draught.

"Yes, yes," says the good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of
wisdom. "That's such advice as your father would have given you,
Bart. You never saw your father. More's the pity. He was my true
son." Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was particularly
pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear.

"He was my true son," repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread
and butter on his knee, "a good accountant, and died fifteen years
ago."

Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with
"Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, fifteen
hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and hid!" Her
worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, immediately
discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of her
chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance, after
visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is
particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing, firstly because
the exertion generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and
gives him an air of goblin rakishness, secondly because he mutters
violent imprecations against Mrs. Smallweed, and thirdly because the
contrast between those powerful expressions and his powerless figure
is suggestive of a baleful old malignant who would be very wicked if
he could. All this, however, is so common in the Smallweed family
circle that it produces no impression. The old gentleman is merely
shaken and has his internal feathers beaten up, the cushion is
restored to its usual place beside him, and the old lady, perhaps
with her cap adjusted and perhaps not, is planted in her chair again,
ready to be bowled down like a ninepin.

Some time elapses in the present instance before the old gentleman is
sufficiently cool to resume his discourse, and even then he mixes it
up with several edifying expletives addressed to the unconscious
partner of his bosom, who holds communication with nothing on earth
but the trivets. As thus: "If your father, Bart, had lived longer, he
might have been worth a deal of money--you brimstone chatterer!--but
just as he was beginning to build up the house that he had been
making the foundations for, through many a year--you jade of a
magpie, jackdaw, and poll-parrot, what do you mean!--he took ill and
died of a low fever, always being a sparing and a spare man, full of
business care--I should like to throw a cat at you instead of a
cushion, and I will too if you make such a confounded fool of
yourself!--and your mother, who was a prudent woman as dry as a chip,
just dwindled away like touchwood after you and Judy were born--you
are an old pig. You are a brimstone pig. You're a head of swine!"

Judy, not interested in what she has often heard, begins to collect
in a basin various tributary streams of tea, from the bottoms of cups
and saucers and from the bottom of the tea-pot for the little
charwoman's evening meal. In like manner she gets together, in the
iron bread-basket, as many outside fragments and worn-down heels of
loaves as the rigid economy of the house has left in existence.

"But your father and me were partners, Bart," says the old gentleman,
"and when I am gone, you and Judy will have all there is. It's rare
for you both that you went out early in life--Judy to the flower
business, and you to the law. You won't want to spend it. You'll get
your living without it, and put more to it. When I am gone, Judy will
go back to the flower business and you'll still stick to the law."

One might infer from Judy's appearance that her business rather lay
with the thorns than the flowers, but she has in her time been
apprenticed to the art and mystery of artificial flower-making. A
close observer might perhaps detect both in her eye and her
brother's, when their venerable grandsire anticipates his being gone,
some little impatience to know when he may be going, and some
resentful opinion that it is time he went.

"Now, if everybody has done," says Judy, completing her preparations,
"I'll have that girl in to her tea. She would never leave off if she
took it by herself in the kitchen."

Charley is accordingly introduced, and under a heavy fire of eyes,
sits down to her basin and a Druidical ruin of bread and butter. In
the active superintendence of this young person, Judy Smallweed
appears to attain a perfectly geological age and to date from the
remotest periods. Her systematic manner of flying at her and pouncing
on her, with or without pretence, whether or no, is wonderful,
evincing an accomplishment in the art of girl-driving seldom reached
by the oldest practitioners.

"Now, don't stare about you all the afternoon," cries Judy, shaking
her head and stamping her foot as she happens to catch the glance
which has been previously sounding the basin of tea, "but take your
victuals and get back to your work."

"Yes, miss," says Charley.

"Don't say yes," returns Miss Smallweed, "for I know what you girls
are. Do it without saying it, and then I may begin to believe you."

Charley swallows a great gulp of tea in token of submission and so
disperses the Druidical ruins that Miss Smallweed charges her not to
gormandize, which "in you girls," she observes, is disgusting.
Charley might find some more difficulty in meeting her views on the
general subject of girls but for a knock at the door.

"See who it is, and don't chew when you open it!" cries Judy.

The object of her attentions withdrawing for the purpose, Miss
Smallweed takes that opportunity of jumbling the remainder of the
bread and butter together and launching two or three dirty tea-cups
into the ebb-tide of the basin of tea as a hint that she considers
the eating and drinking terminated.

"Now! Who is it, and what's wanted?" says the snappish Judy.

It is one Mr. George, it appears. Without other announcement or
ceremony, Mr. George walks in.

"Whew!" says Mr. George. "You are hot here. Always a fire, eh? Well!
Perhaps you do right to get used to one." Mr. George makes the latter
remark to himself as he nods to Grandfather Smallweed.

"Ho! It's you!" cries the old gentleman. "How de do? How de do?"

"Middling," replies Mr. George, taking a chair. "Your granddaughter I
have had the honour of seeing before; my service to you, miss."

"This is my grandson," says Grandfather Smallweed. "You ha'n't seen
him before. He is in the law and not much at home."

"My service to him, too! He is like his sister. He is very like his
sister. He is devilish like his sister," says Mr. George, laying a
great and not altogether complimentary stress on his last adjective.

"And how does the world use you, Mr. George?" Grandfather Smallweed
inquires, slowly rubbing his legs.

"Pretty much as usual. Like a football."

He is a swarthy brown man of fifty, well made, and good looking, with
crisp dark hair, bright eyes, and a broad chest. His sinewy and
powerful hands, as sunburnt as his face, have evidently been used to
a pretty rough life. What is curious about him is that he sits
forward on his chair as if he were, from long habit, allowing space
for some dress or accoutrements that he has altogether laid aside.
His step too is measured and heavy and would go well with a weighty
clash and jingle of spurs. He is close-shaved now, but his mouth is
set as if his upper lip had been for years familiar with a great
moustache; and his manner of occasionally laying the open palm of his
broad brown hand upon it is to the same effect. Altogether one might
guess Mr. George to have been a trooper once upon a time.

A special contrast Mr. George makes to the Smallweed family. Trooper
was never yet billeted upon a household more unlike him. It is a
broadsword to an oyster-knife. His developed figure and their stunted
forms, his large manner filling any amount of room and their little
narrow pinched ways, his sounding voice and their sharp spare tones,
are in the strongest and the strangest opposition. As he sits in the
middle of the grim parlour, leaning a little forward, with his hands
upon his thighs and his elbows squared, he looks as though, if he
remained there long, he would absorb into himself the whole family
and the whole four-roomed house, extra little back-kitchen and all.

"Do you rub your legs to rub life into 'em?" he asks of Grandfather
Smallweed after looking round the room.

"Why, it's partly a habit, Mr. George, and--yes--it partly helps the
circulation," he replies.

"The cir-cu-la-tion!" repeats Mr. George, folding his arms upon his
chest and seeming to become two sizes larger. "Not much of that, I
should think."

"Truly I'm old, Mr. George," says Grandfather Smallweed. "But I can
carry my years. I'm older than HER," nodding at his wife, "and see
what she is? You're a brimstone chatterer!" with a sudden revival of
his late hostility.

"Unlucky old soul!" says Mr. George, turning his head in that
direction. "Don't scold the old lady. Look at her here, with her poor
cap half off her head and her poor hair all in a muddle. Hold up,
ma'am. That's better. There we are! Think of your mother, Mr.
Smallweed," says Mr. George, coming back to his seat from assisting
her, "if your wife an't enough."

"I suppose you were an excellent son, Mr. George?" the old man hints
with a leer.

The colour of Mr. George's face rather deepens as he replies, "Why
no. I wasn't."

"I am astonished at it."

"So am I. I ought to have been a good son, and I think I meant to
have been one. But I wasn't. I was a thundering bad son, that's the
long and the short of it, and never was a credit to anybody."

"Surprising!" cries the old man.

"However," Mr. George resumes, "the less said about it, the better
now. Come! You know the agreement. Always a pipe out of the two
months' interest! (Bosh! It's all correct. You needn't be afraid to
order the pipe. Here's the new bill, and here's the two months'
interest-money, and a devil-and-all of a scrape it is to get it
together in my business.)"

Mr. George sits, with his arms folded, consuming the family and the
parlour while Grandfather Smallweed is assisted by Judy to two black
leathern cases out of a locked bureau, in one of which he secures the
document he has just received, and from the other takes another
similar document which he hands to Mr. George, who twists it up for a
pipelight. As the old man inspects, through his glasses, every
up-stroke and down-stroke of both documents before he releases them
from their leathern prison, and as he counts the money three times
over and requires Judy to say every word she utters at least twice,
and is as tremulously slow of speech and action as it is possible to
be, this business is a long time in progress. When it is quite
concluded, and not before, he disengages his ravenous eyes and
fingers from it and answers Mr. George's last remark by saying,
"Afraid to order the pipe? We are not so mercenary as that, sir.
Judy, see directly to the pipe and the glass of cold brandy-and-water
for Mr. George."

The sportive twins, who have been looking straight before them all
this time except when they have been engrossed by the black leathern
cases, retire together, generally disdainful of the visitor, but
leaving him to the old man as two young cubs might leave a traveller
to the parental bear.

"And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?" says Mr. George
with folded arms.

"Just so, just so," the old man nods.

"And don't you occupy yourself at all?"

"I watch the fire--and the boiling and the roasting--"

"When there is any," says Mr. George with great expression.

"Just so. When there is any."

"Don't you read or get read to?"

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph. "No, no. We have
never been readers in our family. It don't pay. Stuff. Idleness.
Folly. No, no!"

"There's not much to choose between your two states," says the
visitor in a key too low for the old man's dull hearing as he looks
from him to the old woman and back again. "I say!" in a louder voice.

"I hear you."

"You'll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear."

"My dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both
hands to embrace him. "Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in
the city that I got to lend you the money--HE might!"

"Oh! You can't answer for him?" says Mr. George, finishing the
inquiry in his lower key with the words "You lying old rascal!"

"My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn't trust him.
He will have his bond, my dear friend."

"Devil doubt him," says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a
tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the
brandy-and-water, he asks her, "How do you come here! You haven't got
the family face."

"I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley.

The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off,
with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head.
"You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth
as much as it wants fresh air." Then he dismisses her, lights his
pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's friend in the city--the one
solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman's imagination.

"So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?"

"I think he might--I am afraid he would. I have known him do it,"
says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, "twenty times."

Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing
over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers "Twenty
thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty
guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty--" and is then cut
short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular
experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it
crushes her in the usual manner.

"You're a brimstone idiot. You're a scorpion--a brimstone scorpion!
You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering clattering broomstick
witch that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his
chair. "My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?"

Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at the
other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by
the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his
chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or
no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him and shake him
into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him violently
enough to make his head roll like a harlequin's, he puts him smartly
down in his chair again and adjusts his skull-cap with such a rub
that the old man winks with both eyes for a minute afterwards.

"O Lord!" gasps Mr. Smallweed. "That'll do. Thank you, my dear
friend, that'll do. Oh, dear me, I'm out of breath. O Lord!" And Mr.
Smallweed says it not without evident apprehensions of his dear
friend, who still stands over him looming larger than ever.

The alarming presence, however, gradually subsides into its chair and
falls to smoking in long puffs, consoling itself with the
philosophical reflection, "The name of your friend in the city begins
with a D, comrade, and you're about right respecting the bond."

"Did you speak, Mr. George?" inquires the old man.

The trooper shakes his head, and leaning forward with his right elbow
on his right knee and his pipe supported in that hand, while his
other hand, resting on his left leg, squares his left elbow in a
martial manner, continues to smoke. Meanwhile he looks at Mr.
Smallweed with grave attention and now and then fans the cloud of
smoke away in order that he may see him the more clearly.

"I take it," he says, making just as much and as little change in his
position as will enable him to reach the glass to his lips with a
round, full action, "that I am the only man alive (or dead either)
that gets the value of a pipe out of YOU?"

"Well," returns the old man, "it's true that I don't see company, Mr.
George, and that I don't treat. I can't afford to it. But as you, in
your pleasant way, made your pipe a condition--"

"Why, it's not for the value of it; that's no great thing. It was a
fancy to get it out of you. To have something in for my money."

"Ha! You're prudent, prudent, sir!" cries Grandfather Smallweed,
rubbing his legs.

"Very. I always was." Puff. "It's a sure sign of my prudence that I
ever found the way here." Puff. "Also, that I am what I am." Puff. "I
am well known to be prudent," says Mr. George, composedly smoking. "I
rose in life that way."

"Don't be down-hearted, sir. You may rise yet."

Mr. George laughs and drinks.

"Ha'n't you no relations, now," asks Grandfather Smallweed with a
twinkle in his eyes, "who would pay off this little principal or who
would lend you a good name or two that I could persuade my friend in
the city to make you a further advance upon? Two good names would be
sufficient for my friend in the city. Ha'n't you no such relations,
Mr. George?"

Mr. George, still composedly smoking, replies, "If I had, I shouldn't
trouble them. I have been trouble enough to my belongings in my day.
It MAY be a very good sort of penitence in a vagabond, who has wasted
the best time of his life, to go back then to decent people that he
never was a credit to and live upon them, but it's not my sort. The
best kind of amends then for having gone away is to keep away, in my
opinion."

"But natural affection, Mr. George," hints Grandfather Smallweed.

"For two good names, hey?" says Mr. George, shaking his head and
still composedly smoking. "No. That's not my sort either."

Grandfather Smallweed has been gradually sliding down in his chair
since his last adjustment and is now a bundle of clothes with a voice
in it calling for Judy. That houri, appearing, shakes him up in the
usual manner and is charged by the old gentleman to remain near him.
For he seems chary of putting his visitor to the trouble of repeating
his late attentions.

"Ha!" he observes when he is in trim again. "If you could have traced
out the captain, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you. If
when you first came here, in consequence of our advertisement in the
newspapers--when I say 'our,' I'm alluding to the advertisements of
my friend in the city, and one or two others who embark their capital
in the same way, and are so friendly towards me as sometimes to give
me a lift with my little pittance--if at that time you could have
helped us, Mr. George, it would have been the making of you."

"I was willing enough to be 'made,' as you call it," says Mr. George,
smoking not quite so placidly as before, for since the entrance of
Judy he has been in some measure disturbed by a fascination, not of
the admiring kind, which obliges him to look at her as she stands by
her grandfather's chair, "but on the whole, I am glad I wasn't now."

"Why, Mr. George? In the name of--of brimstone, why?" says
Grandfather Smallweed with a plain appearance of exasperation.
(Brimstone apparently suggested by his eye lighting on Mrs. Smallweed
in her slumber.)

"For two reasons, comrade."

"And what two reasons, Mr. George? In the name of the--"

"Of our friend in the city?" suggests Mr. George, composedly
drinking.

"Aye, if you like. What two reasons?"

"In the first place," returns Mr. George, but still looking at Judy
as if she being so old and so like her grandfather it is indifferent
which of the two he addresses, "you gentlemen took me in. You
advertised that Mr. Hawdon (Captain Hawdon, if you hold to the saying
'Once a captain, always a captain') was to hear of something to his
advantage."

"Well?" returns the old man shrilly and sharply.

"Well!" says Mr. George, smoking on. "It wouldn't have been much to
his advantage to have been clapped into prison by the whole bill and
judgment trade of London."

"How do you know that? Some of his rich relations might have paid his
debts or compounded for 'em. Besides, he had taken US in. He owed us
immense sums all round. I would sooner have strangled him than had no
return. If I sit here thinking of him," snarls the old man, holding
up his impotent ten fingers, "I want to strangle him now." And in a
sudden access of fury, he throws the cushion at the unoffending Mrs.
Smallweed, but it passes harmlessly on one side of her chair.

"I don't need to be told," returns the trooper, taking his pipe from
his lips for a moment and carrying his eyes back from following the
progress of the cushion to the pipe-bowl which is burning low, "that
he carried on heavily and went to ruin. I have been at his right hand
many a day when he was charging upon ruin full-gallop. I was with him
when he was sick and well, rich and poor. I laid this hand upon him
after he had run through everything and broken down everything
beneath him--when he held a pistol to his head."

"I wish he had let it off," says the benevolent old man, "and blown
his head into as many pieces as he owed pounds!"

"That would have been a smash indeed," returns the trooper coolly;
"any way, he had been young, hopeful, and handsome in the days gone
by, and I am glad I never found him, when he was neither, to lead to
a result so much to his advantage. That's reason number one."

"I hope number two's as good?" snarls the old man.

"Why, no. It's more of a selfish reason. If I had found him, I must
have gone to the other world to look. He was there."

"How do you know he was there?"

"He wasn't here."

"How do you know he wasn't here?"

"Don't lose your temper as well as your money," says Mr. George,
calmly knocking the ashes out of his pipe. "He was drowned long
before. I am convinced of it. He went over a ship's side. Whether
intentionally or accidentally, I don't know. Perhaps your friend in
the city does. Do you know what that tune is, Mr. Smallweed?" he adds
after breaking off to whistle one, accompanied on the table with the
empty pipe.

"Tune!" replied the old man. "No. We never have tunes here."

"That's the Dead March in Saul. They bury soldiers to it,
so it's the natural end of the subject. Now, if your pretty
granddaughter--excuse me, miss--will condescend to take care of this
pipe for two months, we shall save the cost of one next time. Good
evening, Mr. Smallweed!"

"My dear friend!" the old man gives him both his hands.

"So you think your friend in the city will be hard upon me if I fall
in a payment?" says the trooper, looking down upon him like a giant.

"My dear friend, I am afraid he will," returns the old man, looking
up at him like a pygmy.

Mr. George laughs, and with a glance at Mr. Smallweed and a parting
salutation to the scornful Judy, strides out of the parlour, clashing
imaginary sabres and other metallic appurtenances as he goes.

"You're a damned rogue," says the old gentleman, making a hideous
grimace at the door as he shuts it. "But I'll lime you, you dog, I'll
lime you!"

After this amiable remark, his spirit soars into those enchanting
regions of reflection which its education and pursuits have opened to
it, and again he and Mrs. Smallweed while away the rosy hours, two
unrelieved sentinels forgotten as aforesaid by the Black Serjeant.

While the twain are faithful to their post, Mr. George strides
through the streets with a massive kind of swagger and a grave-enough
face. It is eight o'clock now, and the day is fast drawing in. He
stops hard by Waterloo Bridge and reads a playbill, decides to go to
Astley's Theatre. Being there, is much delighted with the horses and
the feats of strength; looks at the weapons with a critical eye;
disapproves of the combats as giving evidences of unskilful
swordsmanship; but is touched home by the sentiments. In the last
scene, when the Emperor of Tartary gets up into a cart and
condescends to bless the united lovers by hovering over them with the
Union Jack, his eyelashes are moistened with emotion.

The theatre over, Mr. George comes across the water again and makes
his way to that curious region lying about the Haymarket and
Leicester Square which is a centre of attraction to indifferent
foreign hotels and indifferent foreigners, racket-courts,
fighting-men, swordsmen, footguards, old china, gaming-houses,
exhibitions, and a large medley of shabbiness and shrinking out of
sight. Penetrating to the heart of this region, he arrives by a court
and a long whitewashed passage at a great brick building composed of
bare walls, floors, roof-rafters, and skylights, on the front of
which, if it can be said to have any front, is painted GEORGE'S
SHOOTING GALLERY, &c.

Into George's Shooting Gallery, &c., he goes; and in it there are
gaslights (partly turned off now), and two whitened targets for
rifle-shooting, and archery accommodation, and fencing appliances,
and all necessaries for the British art of boxing. None of these
sports or exercises being pursued in George's Shooting Gallery
to-night, which is so devoid of company that a little grotesque man
with a large head has it all to himself and lies asleep upon the
floor.

The little man is dressed something like a gunsmith, in a green-baize
apron and cap; and his face and hands are dirty with gunpowder and
begrimed with the loading of guns. As he lies in the light before a
glaring white target, the black upon him shines again. Not far off is
the strong, rough, primitive table with a vice upon it at which he
has been working. He is a little man with a face all crushed
together, who appears, from a certain blue and speckled appearance
that one of his cheeks presents, to have been blown up, in the way of
business, at some odd time or times.

"Phil!" says the trooper in a quiet voice.

"All right!" cries Phil, scrambling to his feet.

"Anything been doing?"

"Flat as ever so much swipes," says Phil. "Five dozen rifle and a
dozen pistol. As to aim!" Phil gives a howl at the recollection.

"Shut up shop, Phil!"

As Phil moves about to execute this order, it appears that he is
lame, though able to move very quickly. On the speckled side of his
face he has no eyebrow, and on the other side he has a bushy black
one, which want of uniformity gives him a very singular and rather
sinister appearance. Everything seems to have happened to his hands
that could possibly take place consistently with the retention of all
the fingers, for they are notched, and seamed, and crumpled all over.
He appears to be very strong and lifts heavy benches about as if he
had no idea what weight was. He has a curious way of limping round
the gallery with his shoulder against the wall and tacking off at
objects he wants to lay hold of instead of going straight to them,
which has left a smear all round the four walls, conventionally
called "Phil's mark."

This custodian of George's Gallery in George's absence concludes his
proceedings, when he has locked the great doors and turned out all
the lights but one, which he leaves to glimmer, by dragging out from
a wooden cabin in a corner two mattresses and bedding. These being
drawn to opposite ends of the gallery, the trooper makes his own bed
and Phil makes his.

"Phil!" says the master, walking towards him without his coat and
waistcoat, and looking more soldierly than ever in his braces. "You
were found in a doorway, weren't you?"

"Gutter," says Phil. "Watchman tumbled over me."

"Then vagabondizing came natural to YOU from the beginning."

"As nat'ral as possible," says Phil.

"Good night!"

"Good night, guv'ner."

Phil cannot even go straight to bed, but finds it necessary to
shoulder round two sides of the gallery and then tack off at his
mattress. The trooper, after taking a turn or two in the
rifle-distance and looking up at the moon now shining through the
skylights, strides to his own mattress by a shorter route and goes to
bed too.

Mr. Bucket

Allegory looks pretty cool in Lincoln's Inn Fields, though the
evening is hot, for both Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows are wide open, and
the room is lofty, gusty, and gloomy. These may not be desirable
characteristics when November comes with fog and sleet or January
with ice and snow, but they have their merits in the sultry long
vacation weather. They enable Allegory, though it has cheeks like
peaches, and knees like bunches of blossoms, and rosy swellings for
calves to its legs and muscles to its arms, to look tolerably cool
to-night.

Plenty of dust comes in at Mr. Tulkinghorn's windows, and plenty more
has generated among his furniture and papers. It lies thick
everywhere. When a breeze from the country that has lost its way
takes fright and makes a blind hurry to rush out again, it flings as
much dust in the eyes of Allegory as the law--or Mr. Tulkinghorn, one
of its trustiest representatives--may scatter, on occasion, in the
eyes of the laity.

In his lowering magazine of dust, the universal article into which
his papers and himself, and all his clients, and all things of earth,
animate and inanimate, are resolving, Mr. Tulkinghorn sits at one of
the open windows enjoying a bottle of old port. Though a hard-grained
man, close, dry, and silent, he can enjoy old wine with the best. He
has a priceless bin of port in some artful cellar under the Fields,
which is one of his many secrets. When he dines alone in chambers, as
he has dined to-day, and has his bit of fish and his steak or chicken
brought in from the coffee-house, he descends with a candle to the
echoing regions below the deserted mansion, and heralded by a remote
reverberation of thundering doors, comes gravely back encircled by an
earthy atmosphere and carrying a bottle from which he pours a radiant
nectar, two score and ten years old, that blushes in the glass to
find itself so famous and fills the whole room with the fragrance of
southern grapes.

Mr. Tulkinghorn, sitting in the twilight by the open window, enjoys
his wine. As if it whispered to him of its fifty years of silence and
seclusion, it shuts him up the closer. More impenetrable than ever,
he sits, and drinks, and mellows as it were in secrecy, pondering at
that twilight hour on all the mysteries he knows, associated with
darkening woods in the country, and vast blank shut-up houses in
town, and perhaps sparing a thought or two for himself, and his
family history, and his money, and his will--all a mystery to every
one--and that one bachelor friend of his, a man of the same mould and
a lawyer too, who lived the same kind of life until he was
seventy-five years old, and then suddenly conceiving (as it is
supposed) an impression that it was too monotonous, gave his gold
watch to his hair-dresser one summer evening and walked leisurely
home to the Temple and hanged himself.

But Mr. Tulkinghorn is not alone to-night to ponder at his usual
length. Seated at the same table, though with his chair modestly and
uncomfortably drawn a little way from it, sits a bald, mild, shining
man who coughs respectfully behind his hand when the lawyer bids him
fill his glass.

"Now, Snagsby," says Mr. Tulkinghorn, "to go over this odd story
again."

"If you please, sir."

"You told me when you were so good as to step round here last
night--"

"For which I must ask you to excuse me if it was a liberty, sir; but
I remember that you had taken a sort of an interest in that person,
and I thought it possible that you might--just--wish--to--"

Mr. Tulkinghorn is not the man to help him to any conclusion or to
admit anything as to any possibility concerning himself. So Mr.
Snagsby trails off into saying, with an awkward cough, "I must ask
you to excuse the liberty, sir, I am sure."

"Not at all," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "You told me, Snagsby, that you
put on your hat and came round without mentioning your intention to
your wife. That was prudent I think, because it's not a matter of
such importance that it requires to be mentioned."

"Well, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby, "you see, my little woman is--not
to put too fine a point upon it--inquisitive. She's inquisitive. Poor
little thing, she's liable to spasms, and it's good for her to have
her mind employed. In consequence of which she employs it--I should
say upon every individual thing she can lay hold of, whether it
concerns her or not--especially not. My little woman has a very
active mind, sir."

Mr. Snagsby drinks and murmurs with an admiring cough behind his
hand, "Dear me, very fine wine indeed!"

"Therefore you kept your visit to yourself last night?" says Mr.
Tulkinghorn. "And to-night too?"

"Yes, sir, and to-night, too. My little woman is at present in--not
to put too fine a point on it--in a pious state, or in what she
considers such, and attends the Evening Exertions (which is the name
they go by) of a reverend party of the name of Chadband. He has a
great deal of eloquence at his command, undoubtedly, but I am not
quite favourable to his style myself. That's neither here nor there.
My little woman being engaged in that way made it easier for me to
step round in a quiet manner."

Mr. Tulkinghorn assents. "Fill your glass, Snagsby."

"Thank you, sir, I am sure," returns the stationer with his cough of
deference. "This is wonderfully fine wine, sir!"

"It is a rare wine now," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "It is fifty years
old."

"Is it indeed, sir? But I am not surprised to hear it, I am sure. It
might be--any age almost." After rendering this general tribute to
the port, Mr. Snagsby in his modesty coughs an apology behind his
hand for drinking anything so precious.

"Will you run over, once again, what the boy said?" asks Mr.
Tulkinghorn, putting his hands into the pockets of his rusty
smallclothes and leaning quietly back in his chair.

"With pleasure, sir."

Then, with fidelity, though with some prolixity, the law-stationer
repeats Jo's statement made to the assembled guests at his house. On
coming to the end of his narrative, he gives a great start and breaks
off with, "Dear me, sir, I wasn't aware there was any other gentleman
present!"

Mr. Snagsby is dismayed to see, standing with an attentive face
between himself and the lawyer at a little distance from the table, a
person with a hat and stick in his hand who was not there when he
himself came in and has not since entered by the door or by either of
the windows. There is a press in the room, but its hinges have not
creaked, nor has a step been audible upon the floor. Yet this third
person stands there with his attentive face, and his hat and stick in
his hands, and his hands behind him, a composed and quiet listener.
He is a stoutly built, steady-looking, sharp-eyed man in black, of
about the middle-age. Except that he looks at Mr. Snagsby as if he
were going to take his portrait, there is nothing remarkable about
him at first sight but his ghostly manner of appearing.

"Don't mind this gentleman," says Mr. Tulkinghorn in his quiet way.
"This is only Mr. Bucket."

"Oh, indeed, sir?" returns the stationer, expressing by a cough that
he is quite in the dark as to who Mr. Bucket may be.

"I wanted him to hear this story," says the lawyer, "because I have
half a mind (for a reason) to know more of it, and he is very
intelligent in such things. What do you say to this, Bucket?"

"It's very plain, sir. Since our people have moved this boy on, and
he's not to be found on his old lay, if Mr. Snagsby don't object to
go down with me to Tom-all-Alone's and point him out, we can have him
here in less than a couple of hours' time. I can do it without Mr.
Snagsby, of course, but this is the shortest way."

"Mr. Bucket is a detective officer, Snagsby," says the lawyer in
explanation.

"Is he indeed, sir?" says Mr. Snagsby with a strong tendency in his
clump of hair to stand on end.

"And if you have no real objection to accompany Mr. Bucket to the
place in question," pursues the lawyer, "I shall feel obliged to you
if you will do so."

In a moment's hesitation on the part of Mr. Snagsby, Bucket dips down
to the bottom of his mind.

"Don't you be afraid of hurting the boy," he says. "You won't do
that. It's all right as far as the boy's concerned. We shall only
bring him here to ask him a question or so I want to put to him, and
he'll be paid for his trouble and sent away again. It'll be a good
job for him. I promise you, as a man, that you shall see the boy sent
away all right. Don't you be afraid of hurting him; you an't going to
do that."

"Very well, Mr. Tulkinghorn!" cries Mr. Snagsby cheerfully. And
reassured, "Since that's the case--"

"Yes! And lookee here, Mr. Snagsby," resumes Bucket, taking him aside
by the arm, tapping him familiarly on the breast, and speaking in a
confidential tone. "You're a man of the world, you know, and a man of
business, and a man of sense. That's what YOU are."

"I am sure I am much obliged to you for your good opinion," returns
the stationer with his cough of modesty, "but--"

"That's what YOU are, you know," says Bucket. "Now, it an't necessary
to say to a man like you, engaged in your business, which is a
business of trust and requires a person to be wide awake and have his
senses about him and his head screwed on tight (I had an uncle in
your business once)--it an't necessary to say to a man like you that
it's the best and wisest way to keep little matters like this quiet.
Don't you see? Quiet!"

"Certainly, certainly," returns the other.

"I don't mind telling YOU," says Bucket with an engaging appearance
of frankness, "that as far as I can understand it, there seems to be
a doubt whether this dead person wasn't entitled to a little
property, and whether this female hasn't been up to some games
respecting that property, don't you see?"

"Oh!" says Mr. Snagsby, but not appearing to see quite distinctly.

"Now, what YOU want," pursues Bucket, again tapping Mr. Snagsby on
the breast in a comfortable and soothing manner, "is that every
person should have their rights according to justice. That's what YOU
want."

"To be sure," returns Mr. Snagsby with a nod.

"On account of which, and at the same time to oblige a--do you call
it, in your business, customer or client? I forget how my uncle used
to call it."

"Why, I generally say customer myself," replies Mr. Snagsby.

"You're right!" returns Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him quite
affectionately. "--On account of which, and at the same time to
oblige a real good customer, you mean to go down with me, in
confidence, to Tom-all-Alone's and to keep the whole thing quiet ever
afterwards and never mention it to any one. That's about your
intentions, if I understand you?"

"You are right, sir. You are right," says Mr. Snagsby.

"Then here's your hat," returns his new friend, quite as intimate
with it as if he had made it; "and if you're ready, I am."

They leave Mr. Tulkinghorn, without a ruffle on the surface of his
unfathomable depths, drinking his old wine, and go down into the
streets.

"You don't happen to know a very good sort of person of the name of
Gridley, do you?" says Bucket in friendly converse as they descend
the stairs.

"No," says Mr. Snagsby, considering, "I don't know anybody of that
name. Why?"

"Nothing particular," says Bucket; "only having allowed his temper to
get a little the better of him and having been threatening some
respectable people, he is keeping out of the way of a warrant I have
got against him--which it's a pity that a man of sense should do."

As they walk along, Mr. Snagsby observes, as a novelty, that however
quick their pace may be, his companion still seems in some
undefinable manner to lurk and lounge; also, that whenever he is
going to turn to the right or left, he pretends to have a fixed
purpose in his mind of going straight ahead, and wheels off, sharply,
at the very last moment. Now and then, when they pass a
police-constable on his beat, Mr. Snagsby notices that both the
constable and his guide fall into a deep abstraction as they come
towards each other, and appear entirely to overlook each other, and
to gaze into space. In a few instances, Mr. Bucket, coming behind
some under-sized young man with a shining hat on, and his sleek hair
twisted into one flat curl on each side of his head, almost without
glancing at him touches him with his stick, upon which the young man,
looking round, instantly evaporates. For the most part Mr. Bucket
notices things in general, with a face as unchanging as the great
mourning ring on his little finger or the brooch, composed of not
much diamond and a good deal of setting, which he wears in his shirt.

When they come at last to Tom-all-Alone's, Mr. Bucket stops for a
moment at the corner and takes a lighted bull's-eye from the
constable on duty there, who then accompanies him with his own
particular bull's-eye at his waist. Between his two conductors, Mr.
Snagsby passes along the middle of a villainous street, undrained,
unventilated, deep in black mud and corrupt water--though the roads
are dry elsewhere--and reeking with such smells and sights that he,
who has lived in London all his life, can scarce believe his senses.
Branching from this street and its heaps of ruins are other streets
and courts so infamous that Mr. Snagsby sickens in body and mind and
feels as if he were going every moment deeper down into the infernal
gulf.

"Draw off a bit here, Mr. Snagsby," says Bucket as a kind of shabby
palanquin is borne towards them, surrounded by a noisy crowd. "Here's
the fever coming up the street!"

As the unseen wretch goes by, the crowd, leaving that object of
attraction, hovers round the three visitors like a dream of horrible
faces and fades away up alleys and into ruins and behind walls, and
with occasional cries and shrill whistles of warning, thenceforth
flits about them until they leave the place.

"Are those the fever-houses, Darby?" Mr. Bucket coolly asks as he
turns his bull's-eye on a line of stinking ruins.

Darby replies that "all them are," and further that in all, for
months and months, the people "have been down by dozens" and have
been carried out dead and dying "like sheep with the rot." Bucket
observing to Mr. Snagsby as they go on again that he looks a little
poorly, Mr. Snagsby answers that he feels as if he couldn't breathe
the dreadful air.

There is inquiry made at various houses for a boy named Jo. As few
people are known in Tom-all-Alone's by any Christian sign, there is
much reference to Mr. Snagsby whether he means Carrots, or the
Colonel, or Gallows, or Young Chisel, or Terrier Tip, or Lanky, or
the Brick. Mr. Snagsby describes over and over again. There are
conflicting opinions respecting the original of his picture. Some
think it must be Carrots, some say the Brick. The Colonel is
produced, but is not at all near the thing. Whenever Mr. Snagsby and
his conductors are stationary, the crowd flows round, and from its
squalid depths obsequious advice heaves up to Mr. Bucket. Whenever
they move, and the angry bull's-eyes glare, it fades away and flits
about them up the alleys, and in the ruins, and behind the walls, as
before.

At last there is a lair found out where Toughy, or the Tough Subject,
lays him down at night; and it is thought that the Tough Subject may
be Jo. Comparison of notes between Mr. Snagsby and the proprietress
of the house--a drunken face tied up in a black bundle, and flaring
out of a heap of rags on the floor of a dog-hutch which is her
private apartment--leads to the establishment of this conclusion.
Toughy has gone to the doctor's to get a bottle of stuff for a sick
woman but will be here anon.

"And who have we got here to-night?" says Mr. Bucket, opening another
door and glaring in with his bull's-eye. "Two drunken men, eh? And
two women? The men are sound enough," turning back each sleeper's arm
from his face to look at him. "Are these your good men, my dears?"

"Yes, sir," returns one of the women. "They are our husbands."

"Brickmakers, eh?"

"Yes, sir."

"What are you doing here? You don't belong to London."

"No, sir. We belong to Hertfordshire."

"Whereabouts in Hertfordshire?"

"Saint Albans."

"Come up on the tramp?"

"We walked up yesterday. There's no work down with us at present, but
we have done no good by coming here, and shall do none, I expect."

"That's not the way to do much good," says Mr. Bucket, turning his
head in the direction of the unconscious figures on the ground.

"It an't indeed," replies the woman with a sigh. "Jenny and me knows
it full well."

The room, though two or three feet higher than the door, is so low
that the head of the tallest of the visitors would touch the
blackened ceiling if he stood upright. It is offensive to every
sense; even the gross candle burns pale and sickly in the polluted
air. There are a couple of benches and a higher bench by way of
table. The men lie asleep where they stumbled down, but the women sit
by the candle. Lying in the arms of the woman who has spoken is a
very young child.

"Why, what age do you call that little creature?" says Bucket. "It
looks as if it was born yesterday." He is not at all rough about it;
and as he turns his light gently on the infant, Mr. Snagsby is
strangely reminded of another infant, encircled with light, that he
has seen in pictures.

"He is not three weeks old yet, sir," says the woman.

"Is he your child?"

"Mine."

The other woman, who was bending over it when they came in, stoops
down again and kisses it as it lies asleep.

"You seem as fond of it as if you were the mother yourself," says Mr.
Bucket.

"I was the mother of one like it, master, and it died."

"Ah, Jenny, Jenny!" says the other woman to her. "Better so. Much
better to think of dead than alive, Jenny! Much better!"

"Why, you an't such an unnatural woman, I hope," returns Bucket
sternly, "as to wish your own child dead?"

"God knows you are right, master," she returns. "I am not. I'd stand
between it and death with my own life if I could, as true as any
pretty lady."

"Then don't talk in that wrong manner," says Mr. Bucket, mollified
again. "Why do you do it?"

"It's brought into my head, master," returns the woman, her eyes
filling with tears, "when I look down at the child lying so. If it
was never to wake no more, you'd think me mad, I should take on so. I
know that very well. I was with Jenny when she lost hers--warn't I,
Jenny?--and I know how she grieved. But look around you at this
place. Look at them," glancing at the sleepers on the ground. "Look
at the boy you're waiting for, who's gone out to do me a good turn.
Think of the children that your business lays with often and often,
and that YOU see grow up!"

"Well, well," says Mr. Bucket, "you train him respectable, and he'll
be a comfort to you, and look after you in your old age, you know."

"I mean to try hard," she answers, wiping her eyes. "But I have been
a-thinking, being over-tired to-night and not well with the ague, of
all the many things that'll come in his way. My master will be
against it, and he'll be beat, and see me beat, and made to fear his
home, and perhaps to stray wild. If I work for him ever so much, and
ever so hard, there's no one to help me; and if he should be turned
bad 'spite of all I could do, and the time should come when I should
sit by him in his sleep, made hard and changed, an't it likely I
should think of him as he lies in my lap now and wish he had died as
Jenny's child died!"

"There, there!" says Jenny. "Liz, you're tired and ill. Let me take
him."

In doing so, she displaces the mother's dress, but quickly readjusts
it over the wounded and bruised bosom where the baby has been lying.

"It's my dead child," says Jenny, walking up and down as she nurses,
"that makes me love this child so dear, and it's my dead child that
makes her love it so dear too, as even to think of its being taken
away from her now. While she thinks that, I think what fortune would
I give to have my darling back. But we mean the same thing, if we
knew how to say it, us two mothers does in our poor hearts!"

As Mr. Snagsby blows his nose and coughs his cough of sympathy, a
step is heard without. Mr. Bucket throws his light into the doorway
and says to Mr. Snagsby, "Now, what do you say to Toughy? Will HE
do?"

"That's Jo," says Mr. Snagsby.

Jo stands amazed in the disk of light, like a ragged figure in a
magic-lantern, trembling to think that he has offended against the
law in not having moved on far enough. Mr. Snagsby, however, giving
him the consolatory assurance, "It's only a job you will be paid for,
Jo," he recovers; and on being taken outside by Mr. Bucket for a
little private confabulation, tells his tale satisfactorily, though
out of breath.

"I have squared it with the lad," says Mr. Bucket, returning, "and
it's all right. Now, Mr. Snagsby, we're ready for you."

First, Jo has to complete his errand of good nature by handing over
the physic he has been to get, which he delivers with the laconic
verbal direction that "it's to be all took d'rectly." Secondly, Mr.
Snagsby has to lay upon the table half a crown, his usual panacea for
an immense variety of afflictions. Thirdly, Mr. Bucket has to take Jo
by the arm a little above the elbow and walk him on before him,
without which observance neither the Tough Subject nor any other
Subject could be professionally conducted to Lincoln's Inn Fields.
These arrangements completed, they give the women good night and come
out once more into black and foul Tom-all-Alone's.

By the noisome ways through which they descended into that pit, they
gradually emerge from it, the crowd flitting, and whistling, and
skulking about them until they come to the verge, where restoration
of the bull's-eyes is made to Darby. Here the crowd, like a concourse
of imprisoned demons, turns back, yelling, and is seen no more.
Through the clearer and fresher streets, never so clear and fresh to
Mr. Snagsby's mind as now, they walk and ride until they come to Mr.
Tulkinghorn's gate.

As they ascend the dim stairs (Mr. Tulkinghorn's chambers being on
the first floor), Mr. Bucket mentions that he has the key of the
outer door in his pocket and that there is no need to ring. For a man
so expert in most things of that kind, Bucket takes time to open the
door and makes some noise too. It may be that he sounds a note of
preparation.

Howbeit, they come at last into the hall, where a lamp is burning,
and so into Mr. Tulkinghorn's usual room--the room where he drank his
old wine to-night. He is not there, but his two old-fashioned
candlesticks are, and the room is tolerably light.

Mr. Bucket, still having his professional hold of Jo and appearing to
Mr. Snagsby to possess an unlimited number of eyes, makes a little
way into this room, when Jo starts and stops.

"What's the matter?" says Bucket in a whisper.

"There she is!" cries Jo.

"Who!"

"The lady!"

A female figure, closely veiled, stands in the middle of the room,
where the light falls upon it. It is quite still and silent. The
front of the figure is towards them, but it takes no notice of their
entrance and remains like a statue.

"Now, tell me," says Bucket aloud, "how you know that to be the
lady."

"I know the wale," replies Jo, staring, "and the bonnet, and the
gownd."

"Be quite sure of what you say, Tough," returns Bucket, narrowly
observant of him. "Look again."

"I am a-looking as hard as ever I can look," says Jo with starting
eyes, "and that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the gownd."

"What about those rings you told me of?" asks Bucket.

"A-sparkling all over here," says Jo, rubbing the fingers of his left
hand on the knuckles of his right without taking his eyes from the
figure.

The figure removes the right-hand glove and shows the hand.

"Now, what do you say to that?" asks Bucket.

Jo shakes his head. "Not rings a bit like them. Not a hand like
that."

"What are you talking of?" says Bucket, evidently pleased though, and
well pleased too.

"Hand was a deal whiter, a deal delicater, and a deal smaller,"
returns Jo.

"Why, you'll tell me I'm my own mother next," says Mr. Bucket. "Do
you recollect the lady's voice?"

"I think I does," says Jo.

The figure speaks. "Was it at all like this? I will speak as long as
you like if you are not sure. Was it this voice, or at all like this
voice?"

Jo looks aghast at Mr. Bucket. "Not a bit!"

"Then, what," retorts that worthy, pointing to the figure, "did you
say it was the lady for?"

"Cos," says Jo with a perplexed stare but without being at all shaken
in his certainty, "cos that there's the wale, the bonnet, and the
gownd. It is her and it an't her. It an't her hand, nor yet her
rings, nor yet her woice. But that there's the wale, the bonnet, and
the gownd, and they're wore the same way wot she wore 'em, and it's
her height wot she wos, and she giv me a sov'ring and hooked it."

"Well!" says Mr. Bucket slightly, "we haven't got much good out of
YOU. But, however, here's five shillings for you. Take care how you
spend it, and don't get yourself into trouble." Bucket stealthily
tells the coins from one hand into the other like counters--which is
a way he has, his principal use of them being in these games of
skill--and then puts them, in a little pile, into the boy's hand and
takes him out to the door, leaving Mr. Snagsby, not by any means
comfortable under these mysterious circumstances, alone with the
veiled figure. But on Mr. Tulkinghorn's coming into the room, the
veil is raised and a sufficiently good-looking Frenchwoman is
revealed, though her expression is something of the intensest.

"Thank you, Mademoiselle Hortense," says Mr. Tulkinghorn with his
usual equanimity. "I will give you no further trouble about this
little wager."

"You will do me the kindness to remember, sir, that I am not at
present placed?" says mademoiselle.

"Certainly, certainly!"

"And to confer upon me the favour of your distinguished
recommendation?"

"By all means, Mademoiselle Hortense."

"A word from Mr. Tulkinghorn is so powerful."

"It shall not be wanting, mademoiselle."

"Receive the assurance of my devoted gratitude, dear sir."

"Good night."

Mademoiselle goes out with an air of native gentility; and Mr.
Bucket, to whom it is, on an emergency, as natural to be groom of the
ceremonies as it is to be anything else, shows her downstairs, not
without gallantry.

"Well, Bucket?" quoth Mr. Tulkinghorn on his return.

"It's all squared, you see, as I squared it myself, sir. There an't a
doubt that it was the other one with this one's dress on. The boy was
exact respecting colours and everything. Mr. Snagsby, I promised you
as a man that he should be sent away all right. Don't say it wasn't
done!"

"You have kept your word, sir," returns the stationer; "and if I can
be of no further use, Mr. Tulkinghorn, I think, as my little woman
will be getting anxious--"

"Thank you, Snagsby, no further use," says Mr. Tulkinghorn. "I am
quite indebted to you for the trouble you have taken already."

"Not at all, sir. I wish you good night."

"You see, Mr. Snagsby," says Mr. Bucket, accompanying him to the door
and shaking hands with him over and over again, "what I like in you
is that you're a man it's of no use pumping; that's what YOU are.
When you know you have done a right thing, you put it away, and it's
done with and gone, and there's an end of it. That's what YOU do."

"That is certainly what I endeavour to do, sir," returns Mr. Snagsby.

"No, you don't do yourself justice. It an't what you endeavour to
do," says Mr. Bucket, shaking hands with him and blessing him in the
tenderest manner, "it's what you DO. That's what I estimate in a man
in your way of business."

Mr. Snagsby makes a suitable response and goes homeward so confused
by the events of the evening that he is doubtful of his being awake
and out--doubtful of the reality of the streets through which he
goes--doubtful of the reality of the moon that shines above him. He
is presently reassured on these subjects by the unchallengeable
reality of Mrs. Snagsby, sitting up with her head in a perfect
beehive of curl-papers and night-cap, who has dispatched Guster to
the police-station with official intelligence of her husband's being
made away with, and who within the last two hours has passed through
every stage of swooning with the greatest decorum. But as the little
woman feelingly says, many thanks she gets for it!

Continuing in London during the long vacation, Mr. Guppy and Richard Carstone work alone in the offies at Kenge and Carboy's. As Guppy is very suspicious of anyone who enters into the employ of his firm, he instantly dislikes and surveils Richard. But Richard only spends his time on Jarndyce & Jarndyce, and since Guppy knows that is a fruitless pursuit, he is somewhat comforted. Bart Smallweed is introduced, a 15 year old boy about the law offices, who very much wishes to be a clerk like Mr. Guppy. Guppy is somewhat indulgent of his small, strange admirer. Mr. Jobling, an unemployed law writer, is entertained by Guppy, with Bart, at a restaurant, where they discuss Jobling's lodging prospects, and Bart shows stupendous alacrity at adding up sums of money. The party goes to Krook's where the old man is placated with liquor, and the room that Nemo formerly occupied is examined and found acceptable. Krook has cleaned it and put some furniture in it. The fact that Jobling is connected with Kenge and Carboy's through Guppy and the Jarndyce case is enough to recommend him as a lodger. Chapter 21 takes place in the Smallweed household in an "ill-favoured" part of London. The family consists of Grandfather Smallweed, a paralytic usurer, Grandmother Smallweed, somewhat of an imbecile, and the twins Bart and Judy, their grandchildren. The entire famiy is grasping, greedy, untutored in any of the finer arts, violent and vulgar. Into this house the young girl Charley Neckett has been brought to be a maid, and she is sorely overworked and maltreated. She is given the leftover slops for her tea, and generally considered to be a slave to be squeezed for every bit of work possible. A visitor arrives, Mr. George Rouncewell, who is making a payment on a debt he owes to Grandfather Smallweed. Mr. Smallweed is a usurer, and the interest on the debt is very high. Mr. George, a bluff, hearty ex-soldier, is polite enough but his disdain for the grasping and sordid family is obvious. With him is Phil Squod, his very loyal servant in the shooting gallery that he runs. Phil is odd and disfigured, but we are to understand that he is a good man, like his master. Mr. George, after attending a play, returns to his place of business, George's Shooting Gallery. We learn that Phil Squod was a foundling, left in gutter as a baby. In Chapter 22, Mr Tulkinhorn dines in his rooms with Mr. Snagsby, who is concious of the honor. Mr. Bucket, a police Inspector, is lurking in the shadows of the room , and comes forward to hear the story that Jo related to Mr. Snagsby about the veiled lady. Mr. Bucket erroneously believes that some money was due to Mr. Nemo, and the "female," as he calls her, was up to some kind of fraud or larceny to get that money. Mr. Bucket takes Mr. Snagsby down to Tom-all-Alone's to find Jo. There they meet the two brickmakers' wives from St Alban's, Jenny and Liz, and Jenny holds Liz's new baby in her arms. Mr. Bucket admires the young child, and they discuss how Jenny's baby had died. Liz despairs, however, of any chance for her own child, since he will be beaten by his father, and see his mother beaten, and become hard. There is a pathetic scene where Snagsby fancies that the brickmaker's baby is very like the Christ child with the halo around his head. The world has gotten no better for these two battered women. Jo arrives, standing in a similar halo of light in the doorway. He fears he will be taken in for some crime, but Mr. Snagsby assures him that it is only a "job that he will be paid for." Snagsby gives him a half a crown, and they take him to Tulkinghorn's office. Immediately upon entering the office Jo believes the he sees the veiled lady. He knows the veil and the dress she is wearing. But when the lady speaks and Jo sees her hands he changes his mind, and says she is not the lady. The disguised Lady is Mademoiselle Hortense, who has been dismissed by Lady Dedlock in favor of Rosa. Mademoiselle Hortense reminds Tulkinghorn that she no longer has a position, and extracts his recommendation for her, and then leaves. Snagsby goes home confused, and Jo is paid 5 shillings by Bucket and goes home.

The ominious obsession of Richard and the Jarndyce and Jarndyce case increases, with the dusty silence and heat of the long vacation intensifying the feeling of impending doom.  Guppy consorts with other young men of the law, and through him we learn of the Smallweed family. The Smallweeds are another completely dysfunctional family, but rather than being spoiled by philanthropy they are spoiled by greed.  Grandfather Smallweed is a vicious man who rules his family and household hard.  Mr. George is, while a strong and healthy man, still a victim of not only the society which causes him to have to borrow money, but also the ruinous interest of Smallweed.  Phil Squod is an adult parallel of Jo -- a foundling who, while disfigured, has found a kind of family with Mr. George, and a place to live and work. The strange episode of Tulkinghorn with the lady's maid is still cryptic to the reader, but when Jo recognizes the dress the reader is lead to believe that, when dismissed by Lady Dedlock, out of revenge Mademoiselle Hortense goes to Tulkinghorn to tell him of the disguise that Lady Dedlock wore to do her errand with Jo.  Jo's recognition of the clothing confirms it. The pathetic scene in Tom-all-Alone's is a continuation of the one begun in St Alban's.  Liz has a baby now, to which Jenny transfers her affections because her own baby died.  The hopelessness of their lives, the brutishness of their husbands, and the utter lack of prospects for their children is fully illustrated in a few words of conversation with the not-unsympathetic Bucket. Dickens is slowly springing the trap that Tulkinghorn has lain for Lady Dedlock.  He has had two wisps of suspicion now -- the interest in the handwriting, and the faint possibility of a recognition when she passed him in the street, veiled, but up until now Tulkinghorn has had no proof.  It is clear that Tulkinghorn doesn't yet know what Lady Dedlock's secret is, but he is definitely aware that she has a secret.  Since he is so contemplative and tenacious, there is no doubt in the reader that he will discover it.