“Boffin!” retorted Wegg, “I warn you not to attempt a joke with me!”
Here Mr. Venus interposed, and remarked that he conceived Mr. Boffin to have taken the description literally; the rather, forasmuch as he, Mr. Venus, had himself supposed the menial to have contracted an affliction or a habit of the nose, involving a serious drawback on the pleasures of social intercourse, until he had discovered that Mr. Wegg’s description of him was to be accepted as merely figurative.
“Anyhow, and every how,” said Wegg, “he has been planted here, and he is here. Now, I won’t have him here. So I call upon Boffin, before I say another word, to fetch him in and send him packing to the right-about.”
The unsuspecting Sloppy was at that moment airing his many buttons within view of the window. Mr. Boffin, after a short interval of impassive discomfiture, opened the window and beckoned him to come in.
“I call upon Boffin,” said Wegg, with one arm akimbo and his head on one side, like a bullying counsel pausing for an answer from a witness, “to inform that menial that I am Master here!”
In humble obedience, when the button-gleaming Sloppy entered Mr. Boffin said to him: “Sloppy, my fine fellow, Mr. Wegg is Master here. He doesn’t want you, and you are to go from here.”
“For good!” Mr. Wegg severely stipulated.
“For good,” said Mr. Boffin.
Sloppy stared, with both his eyes and all his buttons, and his mouth wide open; but was without loss of time escorted forth by Silas Wegg, pushed out at the yard gate by the shoulders, and locked out.
“The atomspear,” said Wegg, stumping back into the room again, a little reddened by his late exertion, “is now freer for the purposes of