do it," he said, impatiently. "Bear a hand and help me. Well!" when somebody had done so. "Now give me that theer hat!"

Ham asked him whither he was going.

"I'm going to seek my niece. I'm going to seek my Em❜ly. I'm a going first, to stave in that theer boat, and sink it where I would have drowned him, as I'm a livin' soul, if I had had one thought of what was in him! As he sat afore me," he said, wildly, holding out his clinched right hand, "as he sat afore me, face to face, strike me down dead, but I'd have drowned him and thought it right! I'm a going to seek my niece!"

"Where?" cried Ham, interposing himself before the door. "Anywhere! I'm a going to seek my niece through the wureld. I'm a going to find my poor niece in her shame, and bring her back. No one stop me! I tell you I'm a going to seek my niece?"

"No, no!" cried Mrs. Gummidge, coming between them in a fit of crying. "No, no, Dan'l, not as you are now. Seek her in a little while, my lone lorn Dan'l, and that 'll be but right! but not as you are now. Sit ye down, and give me your forgiveness for having ever been a worrit to you, Dan'l-what have my contraries ever been to this! and let us speak a word about them times when she was first an orphan, and when Ham was too, and when I was a poor widder woman, and you took me in. It'll soften your poor heart, Dan'l," laying her head upon his shoulder, "and you'll bear your sorrow better; for you know the promise, Dan'l, 'As you have done it unto one of the least of these, you have done it unto me;' and that can never fail under this roof, that's been our shelter for so many, many year!"

He was quite passive now; and when I heard him crying, the impulse that had been upon me to go down upon my knees, and ask their pardon for the desolation I had caused, and curse Steerforth, yielded to a better feeling. My overcharged heart found the same relief, and I cried too.

THE SQUEERSES AT HOME.

(From "Nicholas Nickleby.")

WHEN Mr. Squeers left the school-room for the night, he betook himself, as has been before remarked, to his own fireside,

which was situated not in the room in which Nicholas had supped on the night of his arrival, but in a smaller apartment in the rear of the premises, where his lady wife, his amiable son, and accomplished daughter, were in the full enjoyment of each other's society; Mrs. Squeers being engaged in the matronly pursuit of stocking darning, and the young lady and gentleman being occupied in the adjustment of some youthful differences, by means of a pugilistic contest across the table, which, on the approach of their honored parent, subsided into a noiseless exchange of kicks beneath it.

And, in this place, it may be as well to apprise the reader that Miss Fanny Squeers was in her three-and-twentieth year. If there be any one grace or loveliness inseparable from that particular period of life, Miss Squeers may be presumed to have been possessed of it, as there is no reason to suppose that she was a solitary exception to a universal rule. She was not tall like her mother, but short like her father; from the former she inherited a voice of harsh quality; from the latter a remarkable expression of the right eye, something akin to having none at all.

Miss Squeers had been spending a few days with a neighboring friend, and had only just returned to the parental roof. To this circumstance may be referred her having heard nothing of Nicholas, until Mr. Squeers himself now made him the subject of conversation.

Well, my dear," said Squeers, drawing up his chair, "what do you think of him by this time?"

"Think of who?" inquired Mrs. Squeers, who (as she often. remarked) was no grammarian, thank heaven!

"Of the young man

mean?"

the new teacher who else could i

"Oh! that Knuckleboy," said Mrs. Squeers, impatiently. "I hate him."

"What do you hate him for, my dear ?" asked Squeers. "What's that to you?" retorted Mrs. Squeers. "If I hate him, that's enough, ain't it?"

"Quite enough for him, my dear, and a great deal too much, I dare say, if he knew it," replied Squeers, in a pacific tone. "I only asked from curiosity, my dear."

"Well, then, if you want to know," rejoined Mrs. Squeers. "I'll tell you. Because he's a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nose peacock."

Mrs. Squeers, when excited, was accustomed to use strong

language, and, moreover, to make use of a plurality of epithets, some of which were of a figurative kind, as the word peacock, and furthermore the allusion to Nicholas' nose, which was not intended to be taken in a literal sense, but rather to bear a latitude of construction according to the fancy of the hearers.

Neither were they meant to bear reference to each other, so much as to the object on whom they were bestowed, as will be seen in the present case; a peacock with a turned-up nose being a novelty in ornithology, and a thing not commonly seen.

"Hem!" said Squeers, as if in mild deprecation of this outbreak. "He is cheap, my dear; the young man is very cheap."

"Not a bit of it," retorted Mrs. Squeers.

"Five pound a year," said Squeers.

"What of that? it's dear if you don't want him, is n't it?" replied his wife.

"But we do want him," urged Squeers.

"I don't see that you want him any more than the dead," said Mrs. Squeers. "Don't tell me. You can put on the cards and in the advertisements, Education by Mr. Wackford Squeers and able assistants,' without having any assistants, can't you? Is n't it done every day by all the masters about? I've no patience with you."

"Haven't you?" said Squeers, sternly. "I'll tell you what, Mrs. Squeers. In this matter of having a teacher, I'll take my own way, if you please. A slave driver in the West Indies is allowed a man under him, to see that his blacks don't run away, or get up a rebellion; and I'll have a man under me to do the same with our blacks, till such time as little Wackford is able to take charge of the school."

"Am I to take care of the school when I grow up a man, father?" said Wackford, junior, suspending, in the excess of his delight, a vicious kick which he was administering to his sister.

"You are, my son," replied Mr. Squeers, in a sentimental voice.

"Oh, my eye, won't I give it to the boys!" exclaimed the interesting child, grasping his father's cane. "Oh, father, won't I make 'em squeak again!"

It was a proud moment in Mr. Squeers' life, when he witnessed that burst of enthusiasm in his young child's mind, and saw in it a foreshadowing of his future eminence. He pressed

VOL. VII. — - 20

a penny into his hand, and gave vent to his feelings (as did his exemplary wife also), in a shout of approving laughter. The infantile appeal to their common sympathies at once restored cheerfulness to the conversation, and harmony to the company. "He's a nasty, stuck-up monkey, that's what I consider him," said Mrs. Squeers, reverting to Nicholas.

66

Supposing he is," said Squeers, "he is as well stuck up in our schoolroom as any where else, is n't he?— especially as he don't like it."

"Well," said Mrs. Squeers, "there's something in that. I hope it'll bring his pride down, and it shall be no fault of mine if it don't."

Now, a proud usher in a Yorkshire school was such a very extraordinary and unaccountable thing to hear of — any usher at all being a novelty; but a proud one, a being of whose existence the wildest imagination could never have dreamedthat Miss Squeers, who seldom troubled herself with scholastic matters, inquired with much curiosity who this Knuckleboy was, that gave himself such airs.

"Nickleby," said Squeers, spelling the name according to some eccentric system which prevailed in his own mind; "your mother always calls things and people by their wrong names."

"No matter for that," said Mrs. Squeers, "I see them with right eyes, and that's quite enough for me. I watched him when you were laying on to little Bolder this afternoon. He looked as black as thunder all the while, and one time started up as if he had more than got it in his mind to make a rush at you. I saw him, though he thought I did n't."

"Never mind that, father," said Miss Squeers, as the head of the family was about to reply. "Who is the man?"

"Why, your father has got some nonsense in his head that he's the son of a poor gentleman that died the other day," said Mrs. Squeers.

"The son of a gentleman!

"Yes, but I don't believe a word of it. If he's a gentleman's son at all, he's a fondling, that's my opinion."

Mrs. Squeers intended to say "foundling," but as she frequently remarked when she made any such mistake, it would be all the same a hundred years hence; with which axiom of philosophy, indeed, she was in the constant habit of consoling the boys when they labored under more than ordinary ill usage.

"He's nothing of the kind," said Squeers, in answer to the