“You can’t be too well, my dear friend.” Mr Smallweed takes him by both hands. “I have brought my grand-daughter Judy. I couldn’t keep her away. She longed so much to see you.”

“Hum! She bears it calmly!” mutters Mr George.

“So we got a hackney cab, and put a chair in it, and just round the corner they lifted me out of the cab and into the chair, and carried me here, that I might see my dear friend in his own establishment! This,” says Grandfather Smallweed, alluding to the bearer, who has been in danger of strangulation, and who withdraws adjusting his windpipe, “is the driver of the cab. He has nothing extra. It is by agreement included in his fare. This person,” the other bearer, “we engaged in the street outside for a pint of beer. Which is twopence. Judy, give the person twopence. I was not sure you had a workman of your own here, my dear friend, or we needn’t have employed this person.”

Grandfather Smallweed refers to Phil, with a glance of considerable terror, and a half-subdued “O Lord! O dear me!” Nor in his apprehension, on the surface of things, without some reason; for Phil, who has never beheld the apparition in the black velvet cap before, has stopped short with a gun in his hand, with much of the air of a dead shot, intent on picking Mr Smallweed off as an ugly old bird of the crow species.

“Judy, my child,” says Grandfather Smallweed, “give the person his twopence. It’s a great deal for what he has done.”

The person, who is one of those extraordinary specimens of human fungus that spring up spontaneously in the western streets of London, ready dressed in an old red jacket, with a “Mission” for holding horses and calling coaches, received his twopence with anything but transport, tosses the money into the air, catches it over-handed, and retires.

“My dear Mr George,” says Grandfather Smallweed, “would you be so kind as help to carry me to the fire? I am accustomed to a fire, and I am an old man, and I soon chill. O dear me!”

His closing exclamation is jerked out of the venerable gentleman by the suddenness with which Mr Squod, like a genie, catches him up, chair and all, and deposits him on the hearthstone.

“O Lord!” says Mr Smallweed, panting. “O dear me! O my stars! My dear friend, your workman is very strong — and very prompt. O Lord, he is very prompt! Judy, draw me back a little. I’m being scorched in the legs;” which indeed is testified to the noses of all present by the smell of his worsted stockings.

The gentle Judy, having backed her grandfather a little way from the fire, and having shaken him up as usual, and having released his over-shadowed eye from its black velvet extinguisher, Mr Smallweed again says, “O dear me! O Lord!” and looking about, and meeting Mr George’s glance, again stretches out both hands.

“My dear friend! So happy in this meeting! And this is your establishment? It’s a delightful place. It’s a picture! You never find that anything goes off here, accidentally; do you, my dear friend?” adds Grandfather Smallweed, very ill at ease.

“No, no. No fear of that.”

“And your workman. He — O dear me! — he never lets anything off without meaning it; does he, my dear friend?”

“He has never hurt anybody but himself,” says Mr George, smiling.

“But he might, you know. He seems to have hurt himself a good deal, and he might hurt somebody else,” the old gentleman returns. “He mightn’t mean it — or he even might. Mr George, will you order him to leave his infernal fire-arms alone, and go away?”