Mr. Boffin drew an armchair into the space where he stood, and said, seating himself and slyly rubbing his hands:

“Give us Dancer.”

Mr. Wegg pursued the biography of that eminent man through its various phases of avarice and dirt, through Miss Dancer’s death on a sick regimen of cold dumpling, and through Mr. Dancer’s keeping his rags together with a hayband, and warming his dinner by sitting upon it, down to the consolatory incident of his dying naked in a sack. After which he read on as follows: