Chapter 25 - Page 2

secret from her; that he has, under all circumstances, to conceal and hold fast a tender double-tooth, which her sharpness is ever ready to twist out of his head; gives Mr Snagsby, in her dentistical presence, much of the air of a dog who has a reservation from his master, and will look anywhere rather than meet his eye.

These various signs and tokens, marked by the little woman, are not lost upon her. They impel her to say, “Snagsby has something on his mind!” And thus suspicion gets into Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street. From suspicion to jealousy, Mrs Snagsby finds the road as natural and short as from Cook’s Court to Chancery Lane. And thus jealousy gets into Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street. Once there (and it was always lurking thereabout), it is very active and nimble in Mrs Snagsby’s breast — prompting her to nocturnal examinations of Mr Snagsby’s pockets; to secret perusals of Mr Snagsby’s letters; to private researches in the Day Book and Ledger, till, cash-box, and iron safe; to watchings at windows, listenings behind doors, and a general putting of this and that together by the wrong end.

Mrs Snagsby is so perpetually on the alert, that the house becomes ghostly with creaking boards and rustling garments. The ’prentices think somebody may have been murdered there, in bygone times. Guster holds certain loose atoms of an idea (picked up at Tooting, where they were found floating among the orphans), that there is buried money underneath the cellar, guarded by an old man with a white beard, who cannot get out for seven thousand years, because he said the Lord’s Prayer backwards.

“Who was Nimrod?” Mrs Snagsby repeatedly inquires of herself. “Who was that lady — that creature? And who is that boy?” Now, Nimrod being as dead as the mighty hunter whose name Mrs Snagsby has appropriated, and the lady being unproducible, she directs her mental eye, for the present, with redoubled vigilance, to the boy. “And who,” quoth Mrs Snagsby, for the thousand and first time, “is that boy? Who is that—!” And there Mrs Snagsby is seized with an inspiration.

He has no respect for Mr Chadband. No, to be sure, and he wouldn’t have, of course. Naturally he wouldn’t, under those contagious circumstances. He was invited and appointed by Mr Chadband — why, Mrs Snagsby heard it herself with her own ears! — to come back, and be told where he was to go, to be addressed by Mr Chadband; and he never came! Why did he never come? Because he was told not to come. Who told him not to come? Who? Ha, ha! Mrs Snagsby sees it all.

But happily (and Mrs Snagsby tightly shakes her head and tightly smiles), that boy was met by Mr Chadband yesterday in the streets; and that boy, as affording a subject which Mr Chadband desires to improve for the spiritual