“Oh dear me, dear me!” sighs Mr Venus, heavily, snuffing the candle, “the world that appeared so flowery has ceased to blow! You’re casting your eye round the shop, Mr Wegg. Let me show you a light. My working bench. My young man’s bench. A Wice. Tools. Bones, warious. Skulls, warious. Preserved Indian baby. African ditto. Bottled preparations, warious. Everything within reach of your hand, in good preservation. The mouldy ones a-top. What’s in those hampers over them again, I don’t quite remember. Say, human warious. Cats. Articulated English baby. Dogs. Ducks. Glass eyes, warious. Mummied bird. Dried cuticle, warious. Oh, dear me! That’s the general panoramic view.”

Having so held and waved the candle as that all these heterogeneous objects seemed to come forward obediently when they were named, and then retire again, Mr Venus despondently repeats, “Oh dear me, dear me!” resumes his seat, and with drooping despondency upon him, falls to pouring himself out more tea.

“Where am I?” asks Mr Wegg.

“You’re somewhere in the back shop across the yard, sir; and speaking quite candidly, I wish I’d never bought you of the Hospital Porter.”

“Now, look here, what did you give for me?”

“Well,” replies Venus, blowing his tea: his head and face peering out of the darkness, over the smoke of it, as if he were modernizing the old original rise in his family: “you were one of a warious lot, and I don’t know.”

Silas puts his point in the improved form of “What will you take for me?”

“Well,” replies Venus, still blowing his tea, “I’m not prepared, at a moment’s notice, to tell you, Mr Wegg.”

“Come! According to your own account I’m not worth much,” Wegg reasons persuasively.

“Not for miscellaneous working in, I grant you, Mr Wegg; but you might turn out valuable yet, as a —” here Mr Venus takes a gulp of tea, so hot that it makes him choke, and sets his weak eyes watering; “as a Monstrosity, if you’ll excuse me.”

Repressing an indignant look, indicative of anything but a disposition to excuse him, Silas pursues his point.

“I think you know me, Mr Venus, and I think you know I never bargain.”

Mr Venus takes gulps of hot tea, shutting his eyes at every gulp, and opening them again in a spasmodic manner; but does not commit himself to assent.

“I have a prospect of getting on in life and elevating myself by my own independent exertions,” says Wegg, feelingly, “and I shouldn’t like — I tell you openly I should not like — under such circumstances, to be what I may call dispersed, a part of me here, and a part of me there, but should wish to collect myself like a genteel person.”

“It’s a prospect at present, is it, Mr Wegg? Then you haven’t got the money for a deal about you? Then I’ll tell you what I’ll do with you; I’ll hold you over. I am a man of my word, and you needn’t be afraid of my disposing of you. I’ll hold you over. That’s a promise. Oh dear me, dear me!”

Fain to accept his promise, and wishing to propitiate him, Mr Wegg looks on as he sighs and pours himself out more tea, and then says, trying to get a sympathetic tone into his voice:

“You seem very low, Mr Venus. Is business bad?”