“Now, I am a remarkably wooden man, and stiff in the joints, and indisposed to be much in motion; therefore, as a precautionary measure, I always had his fire made up in the morning very big indeed; but

“Really,” he remarks, rubbing his hands complacently, “this will be quite a cheerful family tea, to which I’ve long been a stranger — only it ain’t tea, and we ain’t a family — but that’s like me. Draw

Not I, I am sure. Why, you are like a Jack-in-the-box (I had one given me once, when I was a little lad, and it was the terror of my childhood), springing out like mad, when one never means or expects

Grewgious, feeling strangely drawn towards, and at the same time strangely repelled by this individual with the blue spectacles, “just as if,” he says to himself, “I were a hard old bit of iron, which

An old young man, or a young old man? — Mr. Grewgious’ short-sighted eyes cannot make out which. A man of about middle height; thin and scared looking; with black beard and whiskers; and hair dark as night.

CHAPTER IIMR. GREWGIOUS’S NEW CLERKMR. GREWGIOUS, in his solitary chambers in Staple Inn, sipping a cup of coffee after a late dinner, and sipping it in no very enviable frame of mind, has had a trying

You have waited upon me so often, and now that the place which has known me so well will soon know me no more, I cannot take my last meal alone. You have a few minutes to spare, have you not?”“As for that,”

And, even though the last interview he had had with her had shown him his error in this respect, had revealed to him, so distinctly that miscomprehension was impossible, her shuddering abhorrence of him,

I know you found out at last, and it don’t matter to you why I want to know.”“She got so tottery on her pins,” pursued Winks, with immovable gravity, “that at last she broke down on a stone by the road,

All had felt sure that he would not and could not remain. He had taken the loss of his nephew too much to heart, poor fellow! he was quite an altered man since then. Always still and reserved, he had become

I often preach them patience and endurance, but I do not believe, put to the proof, I myself should practise the half of it. To think of their being driven away, outcasts from the only friends who love

CHAPTER ITWO BREAKFASTS IN CLOISTERHAMSERVICE is over — the early morning service in the old Cathedral of the ancient city of Cloisterham, and the few who have composed the small congregation are rapidly

One night before Yuletide, Jasper gets Durdles to show him over the Cathedral, from the crypt to the top of the tower, by lantern light, for the satisfaction of his archaeological bent. On their way thither

EDITOR’S NOTETHE fate of Edwin Drood, the last of Charles Dickens’ creations, has exercised the minds of not a few literary men of eminence. The best of them could but guess; and which has gone nearest