Chapter 2 - Page 2

bands are on their mettle in Golden Square; and itinerant glee-
singers quaver involuntarily as they raise their voices within its
boundaries.

This would not seem a spot very well adapted to the transaction of
business; but Mr Ralph Nickleby had lived there, notwithstanding,
for many years, and uttered no complaint on that score. He knew
nobody round about, and nobody knew him, although he enjoyed the
reputation of being immensely rich. The tradesmen held that he was
a sort of lawyer, and the other neighbours opined that he was a kind
of general agent; both of which guesses were as correct and definite
as guesses about other people's affairs usually are, or need to be.

Mr Ralph Nickleby sat in his private office one morning, ready
dressed to walk abroad. He wore a bottle-green spencer over a blue
coat; a white waistcoat, grey mixture pantaloons, and Wellington
boots drawn over them. The corner of a small-plaited shirt-frill
struggled out, as if insisting to show itself, from between his chin
and the top button of his spencer; and the latter garment was not
made low enough to conceal a long gold watch-chain, composed of a
series of plain rings, which had its beginning at the handle of a
gold repeater in Mr Nickleby's pocket, and its termination in two
little keys: one belonging to the watch itself, and the other to
some patent padlock. He wore a sprinkling of powder upon his head,
as if to make himself look benevolent; but if that were his purpose,
he would perhaps have done better to powder his countenance also,
for there was something in its very wrinkles, and in his cold
restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would announce
itself in spite of him. However this might be, there he was; and as
he was all alone, neither the powder, nor the wrinkles, nor the
eyes, had the smallest effect, good or bad, upon anybody just then,
and are consequently no business of ours just now.

Mr Nickleby closed an account-book which lay on his desk, and,
throwing himself back in his chair, gazed with an air of abstraction
through the dirty window. Some London houses have a melancholy
little plot of ground behind them, usually fenced in by four high
whitewashed walls, and frowned upon by stacks of chimneys: in which
there withers on, from year to year, a crippled tree, that makes a
show of putting forth a few leaves late in autumn when other trees
shed theirs, and, drooping in the effort, lingers on, all crackled
and smoke-dried, till the following season, when it repeats the same
process, and perhaps, if the weather be particularly genial, even
tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup in its branches. People
sometimes call these dark yards 'gardens'; it is not supposed that
they were