of his English origin, and ’not to have acted
up to his name’ in his government of the Roman
people. With the death of this personage, Mr
Wegg terminated his first reading; long before which
consummation several total eclipses of Mrs Boffin’s
candle behind her black velvet disc, would have been
very alarming, but for being regularly accompanied
by a potent smell of burnt pens when her feathers
took fire, which acted as a restorative and woke her.
Mr Wegg, having read on by rote and attached as few
ideas as possible to the text, came out of the encounter
fresh; but, Mr Boffin, who had soon laid down his
unfinished pipe, and had ever since sat intently staring
with his eyes and mind at the confounding enormities
of the Romans, was so severely punished that he could
hardly wish his literary friend Good-night, and articulate
‘Tomorrow.’
‘Commodious,’ gasped Mr Boffin, staring
at the moon, after letting Wegg out at the gate and
fastening it: ’Commodious fights in that
wild-beast-show, seven hundred and thirty-five times,
in one character only! As if that wasn’t
stunning enough, a hundred lions is turned into the
same wild-beast-show all at once! As if that wasn’t
stunning enough, Commodious, in another character,
kills ’em all off in a hundred goes! As
if that wasn’t stunning enough, Vittle-us (and
well named too) eats six millions’ worth, English
money, in seven months! Wegg takes it easy, but
upon-my-soul to a old bird like myself these are scarers.
And even now that Commodious is strangled, I don’t
see a way to our bettering ourselves.’
Mr Boffin added as he turned his pensive steps towards
the Bower and shook his head, ’I didn’t
think this morning there was half so many Scarers
in Print. But I’m in for it now!’
CUT ADRIFT
The Six Jolly Fellowship Porters, already mentioned
as a tavern of a dropsical appearance, had long settled
down into a state of hale infirmity. In its whole
constitution it had not a straight floor, and hardly
a straight line; but it had outlasted, and clearly
would yet outlast, many a better-trimmed building,
many a sprucer public-house. Externally, it was
a narrow lopsided wooden jumble of corpulent windows
heaped one upon another as you might heap as many toppling
oranges, with a crazy wooden verandah impending over
the water; indeed the whole house, inclusive of the
complaining flag-staff on the roof, impended over
the water, but seemed to have got into the condition
of a faint-hearted diver who has paused so long on
the brink that he will never go in at all.
This description applies to the river-frontage of
the Six Jolly Fellowship Porters. The back of
the establishment, though the chief entrance was there,
so contracted that it merely represented in its connexion
with the front, the handle of a flat iron set upright
on its broadest end. This handle stood at the
bottom of a wilderness of court and alley: which
wilderness pressed so hard and close upon the Six Jolly
Fellowship Porters as to leave the hostelry not an
inch of ground beyond its door. For this reason,
in combination with the fact that the house was all
but afloat at high water, when the Porters had a family
wash the linen subjected to that operation might usually
be seen drying on lines stretched across the reception-rooms
and bed-chambers.
