Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby.
“My friends,” says Chadband, looking round
him in conclusion, “I will not proceed with
my young friend now. Will you come to-morrow,
my young friend, and inquire of this good lady where
I am to be found to deliver a discourse unto you,
and will you come like the thirsty swallow upon the
next day, and upon the day after that, and upon the
day after that, and upon many pleasant days, to hear
discourses?” (This with a cow-like lightness.)
Jo, whose immediate object seems to be to get away
on any terms, gives a shuffling nod. Mr. Guppy
then throws him a penny, and Mrs. Snagsby calls to
Guster to see him safely out of the house. But
before he goes downstairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with
some broken meats from the table, which he carries
away, hugging in his arms.
So, Mr. Chadband—of whom the persecutors
say that it is no wonder he should go on for any length
of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that
the wonder rather is that he should ever leave off,
having once the audacity to begin—retires
into private life until he invests a little capital
of supper in the oil-trade. Jo moves on, through
the long vacation, down to Blackfriars Bridge, where
he finds a baking stony corner wherein to settle to
his repast.
And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking
up at the great cross on the summit of St. Paul’s
Cathedral, glittering above a red-and-violet-tinted
cloud of smoke. From the boy’s face one
might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes,
the crowning confusion of the great, confused city—so
golden, so high up, so far out of his reach.
There he sits, the sun going down, the river running
fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams—everything
moving on to some purpose and to one end—until
he is stirred up and told to “move on”
too.
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.
