bearings, and had not the least idea where his place of residence was to be found, until Mr. Venus shoved him into it. Even then he staggered round and round, weakly staring about him, until Mr. Venus with a hard brush brushed his senses into him and the dust out of him.
Mr. Boffin came down leisurely, for this brushing process had been well accomplished, and Mr. Venus had had time to take his breath, before he reappeared. That he had the bottle somewhere about him could not be doubted; where, was not so clear. He wore a large rough coat, buttoned over, and it might be in any one of half a dozen pockets.
“What’s the matter, Wegg?” said Mr. Boffin. “You are as pale as a candle.”
Mr. Wegg replied, with literal exactness, that he felt as if he had had a turn.
“Bile,” said Mr. Boffin, blowing out the light in the lantern, shutting it up, and stowing it away in the breast of his coat as before. “Are you subject to bile, Wegg?”
Mr. Wegg again replied, with strict adherence to truth, that he didn’t think he had ever had a similar sensation in his head, to anything like the same extent.
“Physic yourself to-morrow, Wegg,” said Mr. Boffin, “to be in order
for next night. By-the-by, this neighbourhood is going to have a loss, Wegg.”
“A loss, sir?”
“Going to lose the Mounds.”
The friendly movers made such an obvious effort not to look at one another, that they might as well have stared at one another with all their might.
“Have you parted with them, Mr. Boffin?” asked Silas.
“Yes; they’re going. Mine’s as good as gone already.”
“You mean the little one of the three, with the pole atop, sir.”
“Yes,” said Mr. Boffin, rubbing his ear in his old way, with that new touch of craftiness added to it. “It has fetched a penny. It’ll begin to be carted off to-morrow.”
“Have you been out to take leave of your old friend, sir?” asked Silas, jocosely.
“No,” said Mr. Boffin. “What the devil put that in your head?”
He was so sudden and rough, that Wegg, who had been hovering closer and closer to his skirts, despatching the back of his hand on exploring expeditions in search of the bottle’s surface, retired two or three paces.
“No offence, sir,” said Wegg, humbly. “No offence.”
Mr. Boffin eyed him as a dog might eye another dog who wanted his bone; and actually retorted with a low growl, as the dog might have retorted.
“Good-night,” he said, after having sunk into a moody silence, with his hands clasped behind him, and his eyes suspiciously wandering about Wegg. — “No! stop there. I know the way out, and I want no light.”
Avarice, and the evening’s legends of avarice, and the inflammatory effect of what he had seen, and perhaps the rush of his ill-conditioned blood to his brain in his descent, wrought Silas Wegg to such a