“Where am I?” asks Mr. Wegg.

“You’re somewhere in the back shop across the yard, sir; and speaking quite candidly, I wish I’d never bought you of the Hospital Porter.”

“Now, look here, what did you give for me?”

“Well,” replies Venus, blowing his tea: his head and face peering out of the darkness, over the smoke of it, as if he were modernizing the old original rise in his family: “you were one of a warious lot, and I don’t know.”

Silas puts his point in the improved form of “What will you take for me?”

“Well,” replies Venus, still blowing his tea, “I’m not prepared, at a moment’s notice, to tell you, Mr. Wegg.”