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!”

CHAPTER XXI

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.