‘Come and look in, Noddy!’ said Mrs Boffin
to Mr Boffin.
Mr Boffin, submitting to be led on tiptoe to the nursery
door, looked in with immense satisfaction, although
there was nothing to see but Bella in a musing state
of happiness, seated in a little low chair upon the
hearth, with her child in her fair young arms, and
her soft eyelashes shading her eyes from the fire.
‘It looks as if the old man’s spirit had
found rest at last; don’t it?’ said Mrs
Boffin.
‘Yes, old lady.’
’And as if his money had turned bright again,
after a long long rust in the dark, and was at last
a beginning to sparkle in the sunlight?’
‘Yes, old lady.’
‘And it makes a pretty and a promising picter;
don’t it?’
‘Yes, old lady.’
But, aware at the instant of a fine opening for a
point, Mr Boffin quenched that observation in this—delivered
in the grisliest growling of the regular brown bear.
’A pretty and a hopeful picter? Mew, Quack
quack, Bow-wow!’ And then trotted silently downstairs,
with his shoulders in a state of the liveliest commotion.
CHECKMATE TO THE FRIENDLY MOVE
Mr and Mrs John Harmon had so timed their taking possession
of their rightful name and their London house, that
the event befel on the very day when the last waggon-load
of the last Mound was driven out at the gates of Boffin’s
Bower. As it jolted away, Mr Wegg felt that the
last load was correspondingly removed from his mind,
and hailed the auspicious season when that black sheep,
Boffin, was to be closely sheared.
Over the whole slow process of levelling the Mounds,
Silas had kept watch with rapacious eyes. But,
eyes no less rapacious had watched the growth of the
Mounds in years bygone, and had vigilantly sifted the
dust of which they were composed. No valuables
turned up. How should there be any, seeing that
the old hard jailer of Harmony Jail had coined every
waif and stray into money, long before?
Though disappointed by this bare result, Mr Wegg felt
too sensibly relieved by the close of the labour,
to grumble to any great extent. A foreman-representative
of the dust contractors, purchasers of the Mounds,
had worn Mr Wegg down to skin and bone. This supervisor
of the proceedings, asserting his employers’
rights to cart off by daylight, nightlight, torchlight,
when they would, must have been the death of Silas
if the work had lasted much longer. Seeming never
to need sleep himself, he would reappear, with a tied-up
broken head, in fantail hat and velveteen smalls,
like an accursed goblin, at the most unholy and untimely
hours. Tired out by keeping close ward over a
long day’s work in fog and rain, Silas would
have just crawled to bed and be dozing, when a horrid
shake and rumble under his pillow would announce an
approaching train of carts, escorted by this Demon
of Unrest, to fall to work again. At another
