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the ghost in despair. The small servant stood with humility in presence

of Miss Sally, and hung her head.

'Are you there?' said Miss Sally.

'Yes, ma'am,' was the answer in a weak voice.

'Go further away from the leg of mutton, or you'll be picking it, I

know,' said Miss Sally.

The girl withdrew into a corner, while Miss Brass took a key from her

pocket, and opening the safe, brought from it a dreary waste of cold

potatoes, looking as eatable as Stonehenge. This she placed before the

small servant, ordering her to sit down before it, and then, taking up

a great carving-knife, made a mighty show of sharpening it upon the

carving-fork.

'Do you see this?' said Miss Brass, slicing off about two square inches

of cold mutton, after all this preparation, and holding it out on the

point of the fork.

The small servant looked hard enough at it with her hungry eyes to see

every shred of it, small as it was, and answered, 'yes.'

'Then don't you ever go and say,' retorted Miss Sally, 'that you hadn't

meat here. There, eat it up.'

This was soon done. 'Now, do you want any more?' said Miss Sally.

The hungry creature answered with a faint 'No.' They were evidently

going through an established form.

'You've been helped once to meat,' said Miss Brass, summing up the

facts; 'you have had as much as you can eat, you're asked if you want

any more, and you answer, 'no!' Then don't you ever go and say you were

allowanced, mind that.'

With those words, Miss Sally put the meat away and locked the safe, and

then drawing near to the small servant, overlooked her while she

finished the potatoes.

It was plain that some extraordinary grudge was working in Miss Brass's

gentle breast, and that it was that which impelled her, without the

smallest present cause, to rap the child with the blade of the knife,

now on her hand, now on her head, and now on her back, as if she found

it quite impossible to stand so close to her without administering a

few slight knocks. But Mr Swiveller was not a little surprised to see

his fellow-clerk, after walking slowly backwards towards the door, as

if she were trying to withdraw herself from the room but could not

accomplish it, dart suddenly forward, and falling on the small servant

give her some hard blows with her clenched hand. The victim cried, but

in a subdued manner as if she feared to raise her voice, and Miss

Sally, comforting herself with a pinch of snuff, ascended the stairs,

just as Richard had safely reached the office.

CHAPTER 37

The single gentleman among his other peculiarities--and he had a very

plentiful stock, of which he every day furnished some new

specimen--took a most extraordinary and remarkable interest in the

exhibition of Punch. If the sound of a Punch's voice, at ever so

remote a distance, reached Bevis Marks, the single gentleman, though in

bed and asleep, would start up, and, hurrying on his clothes, make for

the spot with all speed, and presently return at the head of a long

procession of idlers, having in the midst the theatre and its

proprietors. Straightway, the stage would be set up in front of Mr

Brass's house; the single gentleman would establish himself at the

first floor window; and the entertainment would proceed, with all its

exciting accompaniments of fife and drum and shout, to the excessive

consternation of all sober votaries of business in that silent

thoroughfare. It might have been expected that when the play was done,

both players and audience would have dispersed; but the epilogue was as

bad as the play, for no sooner was the Devil dead, than the manager of

the puppets and his partner were summoned by the single gentleman to

his chamber, where they were regaled with strong waters from his

private store, and where they held with him long conversations, the

purport of which no human being could fathom. But the secret of these

discussions was of little importance. It was sufficient to know that

while they were proceeding, the concourse without still lingered round

the house; that boys beat upon the drum with their fists, and imitated

Punch with their tender voices; that the office-window was rendered

opaque by flattened noses, and the key-hole of the street-door luminous

with eyes; that every time the single gentleman or either of his guests

was seen at the upper window, or so much as the end of one of their

noses was visible, there was a great shout of execration from the

excluded mob, who remained howling and yelling, and refusing

consolation, until the exhibitors were delivered up to them to be

attended elsewhere. It was sufficient, in short, to know that Bevis

Marks was revolutionised by these popular movements, and that peace and

quietness fled from its precincts.

Nobody was rendered more indignant by these proceedings than Mr Sampson

Brass, who, as he could by no means afford to lose so profitable an

inmate, deemed it prudent to pocket his lodger's affront along with his

cash, and to annoy the audiences who clustered round his door by such

imperfect means of retaliation as were open to him, and which were

confined to the trickling down of foul water on their heads from unseen

watering pots, pelting them with fragments of tile and mortar from the

roof of the house, and bribing the drivers of hackney cabriolets to

come suddenly round the corner and dash in among them precipitately.

It may, at first sight, be matter of surprise to the thoughtless few

that Mr Brass, being a professional gentleman, should not have legally

indicted some party or parties, active in the promotion of the

nuisance, but they will be good enough to remember, that as Doctors

seldom take their own prescriptions, and Divines do not always practise

what they preach, so lawyers are shy of meddling with the Law on their

own account: knowing it to be an edged tool of uncertain application,

very expensive in the working, and rather remarkable for its properties

of close shaving, than for its always shaving the right person.

'Come,' said Mr Brass one afternoon, 'this is two days without a Punch.

I'm in hopes he has run through 'em all, at last.'

'Why are you in hopes?' returned Miss Sally. 'What harm do they do?'

'Here's a pretty sort of a fellow!' cried Brass, laying down his pen in

despair. 'Now here's an aggravating animal!'

'Well, what harm do they do?' retorted Sally.

'What harm!' cried Brass. 'Is it no harm to have a constant hallooing

and hooting under one's very nose, distracting one from business, and

making one grind one's teeth with vexation? Is it no harm to be

blinded and choked up, and have the king's highway stopped with a set

of screamers and roarers whose throats must be made of--of--'

'Brass,' suggested Mr Swiveller.

'Ah! of brass,' said the lawyer, glancing at his clerk, to assure

himself that he had suggested the word in good faith and without any

sinister intention. 'Is that no harm?'

The lawyer stopped short in his invective, and listening for a moment,

and recognising the well-known voice, rested his head upon his hand,

raised his eyes to the ceiling, and muttered faintly, 'There's another!'

Up went the single gentleman's window directly.

'There's another,' repeated Brass; 'and if I could get a break and four

blood horses to cut into the Marks when the crowd is at its thickest,

I'd give eighteen-pence and never grudge it!'

The distant squeak was heard again. The single gentleman's door burst

open. He ran violently down the stairs, out into the street, and so

past the window, without any hat, towards the quarter whence the sound

proceeded--bent, no doubt, upon securing the strangers' services

directly.

'I wish I only knew who his friends were,' muttered Sampson, filling

his pocket with papers; 'if they'd just get up a pretty little

Commission de lunatico at the Gray's Inn Coffee House and give me the

job, I'd be content to have the lodgings empty for one while, at all

events.'

With which words, and knocking his hat over his eyes as if for the

purpose of shutting out even a glimpse of the dreadful visitation, Mr

Brass rushed from the house and hurried away.

As Mr Swiveller was decidedly favourable to these performances, upon

the ground that looking at a Punch, or indeed looking at anything out

of window, was better than working; and as he had been, for this

reason, at some pains to awaken in his fellow clerk a sense of their

beauties and manifold deserts; both he and Miss Sally rose as with one

accord and took up their positions at the window: upon the sill

whereof, as in a post of honour, sundry young ladies and gentlemen who

were employed in the dry nurture of babies, and who made a point of

being present, with their young charges, on such occasions, had already

established themselves as comfortably as the circumstances would allow.

The glass being dim, Mr Swiveller, agreeably to a friendly custom which

he had established between them, hitched off the brown head-dress from

Miss Sally's head, and dusted it carefully therewith. By the time he

had handed it back, and its beautiful wearer had put it on again (which

she did with perfect composure and indifference), the lodger returned

with the show and showmen at his heels, and a strong addition to the

body of spectators. The exhibitor disappeared with all speed behind

the drapery; and his partner, stationing himself by the side of the

Theatre, surveyed the audience with a remarkable expression of

melancholy, which became more remarkable still when he breathed a

hornpipe tune into that sweet musical instrument which is popularly

termed a mouth-organ, without at all changing the mournful expression

of the upper part of his face, though his mouth and chin were, of

necessity, in lively spasms.

The drama proceeded to its close, and held the spectators enchained in

the customary manner. The sensation which kindles in large assemblies,

when they are relieved from a state of breathless suspense and are

again free to speak and move, was yet rife, when the lodger, as usual,

summoned the men up stairs.

'Both of you,' he called from the window; for only the actual

exhibitor--a little fat man--prepared to obey the summons. 'I want to

talk to you. Come both of you!'

'Come, Tommy,' said the little man.

'I an't a talker,' replied the other. 'Tell him so. What should I go

and talk for?'

'Don't you see the gentleman's got a bottle and glass up there?'

returned the little man.

'And couldn't you have said so at first?' retorted the other with

sudden alacrity. 'Now, what are you waiting for? Are you going to

keep the gentleman expecting us all day? haven't you no manners?'

With this remonstrance, the melancholy man, who was no other than Mr

Thomas Codlin, pushed past his friend and brother in the craft, Mr

Harris, otherwise Short or Trotters, and hurried before him to the

single gentleman's apartment.

'Now, my men,' said the single gentleman; 'you have done very well.

What will you take? Tell that little man behind, to shut the door.'

'Shut the door, can't you?' said Mr Codlin, turning gruffly to his

friend. 'You might have knowed that the gentleman wanted the door

shut, without being told, I think.'

Mr Short obeyed, observing under his breath that his friend seemed

unusually 'cranky,' and expressing a hope that there was no dairy in

the neighbourhood, or his temper would certainly spoil its contents.

The gentleman pointed to a couple of chairs, and intimated by an

emphatic nod of his head that he expected them to be seated. Messrs

Codlin and Short, after looking at each other with considerable doubt

and indecision, at length sat down--each on the extreme edge of the

chair pointed out to him--and held their hats very tight, while the

single gentleman filled a couple of glasses from a bottle on the table

beside him, and presented them in due form.

'You're pretty well browned by the sun, both of you,' said their

entertainer. 'Have you been travelling?'

Mr Short replied in the affirmative with a nod and a smile. Mr Codlin

added a corroborative nod and a short groan, as if he still felt the

weight of the Temple on his shoulders.

'To fairs, markets, races, and so forth, I suppose?' pursued the single

gentleman.

'Yes, sir,' returned Short, 'pretty nigh all over the West of England.'

'I have talked to men of your craft from North, East, and South,'

returned their host, in rather a hasty manner; 'but I never lighted on

any from the West before.'

'It's our reg'lar summer circuit is the West, master,' said Short;

'that's where it is. We takes the East of London in the spring and

winter, and the West of England in the summer time. Many's the hard

day's walking in rain and mud, and with never a penny earned, we've had

down in the West.'

'Let me fill your glass again.'

'Much obleeged to you sir, I think I will,' said Mr Codlin, suddenly

thrusting in his own and turning Short's aside. 'I'm the sufferer,

sir, in all the travelling, and in all the staying at home. In town or

country, wet or dry, hot or cold, Tom Codlin suffers. But Tom Codlin

isn't to complain for all that. Oh, no! Short may complain, but if

Codlin grumbles by so much as a word--oh dear, down with him, down

with him directly. It isn't his place to grumble. That's quite out of

the question.'

'Codlin an't without his usefulness,' observed Short with an arch look,

'but he don't always keep his eyes open. He falls asleep sometimes,