“By Jove!” said the chairman, whispering across the table to Mr. Pickwick, “you have hit upon something that one of us, at least, would talk upon forever. You’ll draw old Jack Bamber out; he was never heard to talk about anything else but the inns, and he has lived alone in them till he’s half crazy.”

The individual to whom Lowten alluded, was a little, yellow, high-shouldered man, whose countenance, from his habit of stooping forward when silent, Mr. Pickwick had not observed before. He wondered, though, when the old man raised his shrivelled face, and bent his gray eye upon him, with a keen inquiring look, that such remarkable features could have escaped his attention for a moment. There was a fixed grim smile perpetually on his countenance; he leaned his chin on a long, skinny hand, with nails of extraordinary length; and as he inclined his head to one side, and looked keenly out from beneath his ragged gray eyebrows, there was a strange, wild slyness in his leer, quite repulsive to behold.