“Silas Wegg. — I don’t,” said Mr Wegg, bestirring himself to take the same precaution as before, “I don’t know why Silas, and I don’t know why Wegg.”

“Now, Wegg,” said Mr Boffin, hugging his stick closer, “I want to make a sort of offer to you. Do you remember when you first see me?”

The wooden Wegg looked at him with a meditative eye, and also with a softened air as descrying possibility of profit. “Let me think. I ain’t quite sure, and yet I generally take a powerful sight of notice, too. Was it on a Monday morning, when the butcher-boy had been to our house for orders, and bought a ballad of me, which, being unacquainted with the tune, I run it over to him?”

“Right, Wegg, right! But he bought more than one.”

“Yes, to be sure, sir; he bought several; and wishing to lay out his money to the best, he took my opinion to guide his choice, and we went over the collection together. To be sure we did. Here was him as it might be, and here was myself as it might be, and there was you, Mr Boffin, as you identically are, with your self-same stick under your very same arm, and your very same back towards us. To — be — sure!” added Mr Wegg, looking a little round Mr Boffin, to take him in the rear, and identify this last extraordinary coincidence, “your wery self-same back!”

“What do you think I was doing, Wegg?”

“I should judge, sir, that you might be glancing your eye down the street.”

“No, Wegg. I was a listening.”

“Was you, indeed?” said Mr Wegg, dubiously.

“Not in a dishonorable way, Wegg, because you was singing to the butcher; and you wouldn’t sing secrets to a butcher in the street, you know.”

“It never happened that I did so yet, to the best of my remembrance,” said Mr Wegg, cautiously. “But I might do it. A man can’t say what he might wish to do some day or another.” (This, not to release any little advantage he might derive from Mr Boffin’s avowal.)

“Well,” repeated Boffin, “I was a listening to you and to him. And what do you — you haven’t got another stool, have you? I’m rather thick in my breath.”

“I haven’t got another, but you’re welcome to this,” said Wegg, resigning it. “It’s a treat to me to stand.”

“Lard!” exclaimed Mr Boffin, in a tone of great enjoyment, as he settled himself down, still nursing his stick like a baby, “it’s a pleasant place, this! And then to be shut in on each side, with these ballads, like so many book-leaf blinkers! Why, it’s delightful!”

“If I am not mistaken, sir,” Mr Wegg delicately hinted, resting a hand on his stall, and bending over the discursive Boffin, “you alluded to some offer or another that was in your mind?”

“I’m coming to it! All right. I’m coming to it! I was going to say that when I listened that morning, I listened with hadmiration amounting to haw. I thought to myself, ‘Here’s a man with a wooden leg — a literary man with—’ ”

“N—not exactly so, sir,” said Mr Wegg.

“Why, you know every one of these songs by name and by tune, and if you want to read or to sing any one on ’em off straight, you’ve only to whip on your spectacles and do it!” cried Mr Boffin. “I see you at it!”