Chapter 17 - Page 2

hands if
they had any, in worshipping admiration. The butcher, though a
portly and a prosperous man, doesn't know what to do with
himself; so anxious is he to express humility when discovered by
the passing Boffins taking the air in a mutton grove. Presents are
made to the Boffin servants, and bland strangers with business-
cards meeting said servants in the street, offer hypothetical
corruption. As, 'Supposing I was to be favoured with an order
from Mr Boffin, my dear friend, it would be worth my while'--to do
a certain thing that I hope might not prove wholly disagreeable to
your feelings.

But no one knows so well as the Secretary, who opens and reads
the letters, what a set is made at the man marked by a stroke of
notoriety. Oh the varieties of dust for ocular use, offered in
exchange for the gold dust of the Golden Dustman! Fifty-seven
churches to be erected with half-crowns, forty-two parsonage
houses to be repaired with shillings, seven-and-twenty organs to be
built with halfpence, twelve hundred children to be brought up on
postage stamps. Not that a half-crown, shilling, halfpenny, or
postage stamp, would be particularly acceptable from Mr Boffin,
but that it is so obvious he is the man to make up the deficiency.
And then the charities, my Christian brother! And mostly in
difficulties, yet mostly lavish, too, in the expensive articles of print
and paper. Large fat private double letter, sealed with ducal
coronet. 'Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire. My Dear Sir,--Having
consented to preside at the forthcoming Annual Dinner of the
Family Party Fund, and feeling deeply impressed with the
immense usefulness of that noble Institution and the great
importance of its being supported by a List of Stewards that shall
prove to the public the interest taken in it by popular and
distinguished men, I have undertaken to ask you to become a
Steward on that occasion. Soliciting your favourable reply before
the 14th instant, I am, My Dear Sir, Your faithful Servant,
LINSEED. P.S. The Steward's fee is limited to three Guineas.'
Friendly this, on the part of the Duke of Linseed (and thoughtful in
the postscript), only lithographed by the hundred and presenting
but a pale individuality of an address to Nicodemus Boffin,
Esquire, in quite another hand. It takes two noble Earls and a
Viscount, combined, to inform Nicodemus Boffin, Esquire, in an
equally flattering manner, that an estimable lady in the West of
England has offered to present a purse containing twenty pounds,
to the Society for Granting Annuities to Unassuming Members of
the Middle Classes, if twenty individuals will previously present
purses of one hundred pounds each. And those benevolent
noblemen very kindly point out that if Nicodemus