No, Mr Boffin; the world may term it pride, paltry
pride if you will, but they wouldn’t take it
if you offered it; a loan, sir—for fourteen
weeks to the day, interest calculated at the rate
of five per cent per annum, to be bestowed upon any
charitable institution you may name—is
all they want of you, and if you have the meanness
to refuse it, count on being despised by these great
spirits. There are the beggars of punctual business-habits
too. These will make an end of themselves at
a quarter to one P.M. on Tuesday, if no Post-office
order is in the interim received from Nicodemus Boffin,
Esquire; arriving after a quarter to one P.M. on Tuesday,
it need not be sent, as they will then (having made
an exact memorandum of the heartless circumstances)
be ‘cold in death.’ There are the
beggars on horseback too, in another sense from the
sense of the proverb. These are mounted and ready
to start on the highway to affluence. The goal
is before them, the road is in the best condition,
their spurs are on, the steed is willing, but, at
the last moment, for want of some special thing—a
clock, a violin, an astronomical telescope, an electrifying
machine—they must dismount for ever, unless
they receive its equivalent in money from Nicodemus
Boffin, Esquire. Less given to detail are the
beggars who make sporting ventures. These, usually
to be addressed in reply under initials at a country
post-office, inquire in feminine hands, Dare one who
cannot disclose herself to Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire,
but whose name might startle him were it revealed,
solicit the immediate advance of two hundred pounds
from unexpected riches exercising their noblest privilege
in the trust of a common humanity?
In such a Dismal Swamp does the new house stand, and
through it does the Secretary daily struggle breast-high.
Not to mention all the people alive who have made
inventions that won’t act, and all the jobbers
who job in all the jobberies jobbed; though these
may be regarded as the Alligators of the Dismal Swamp,
and are always lying by to drag the Golden Dustman
under.
But the old house. There are no designs against
the Golden Dustman there? There are no fish of
the shark tribe in the Bower waters? Perhaps
not. Still, Wegg is established there, and would
seem, judged by his secret proceedings, to cherish
a notion of making a discovery. For, when a man
with a wooden leg lies prone on his stomach to peep
under bedsteads; and hops up ladders, like some extinct
bird, to survey the tops of presses and cupboards;
and provides himself an iron rod which he is always
poking and prodding into dust-mounds; the probability
is that he expects to find something.
Chapter 1
