Great sensation on the part of Mrs. Snagsby.

“My friends,” says Chadband, looking round him in conclusion, “I will not proceed with my young friend now.  Will you come to-morrow, my young friend, and inquire of this good lady where I am to be found to deliver a discourse unto you, and will you come like the thirsty swallow upon the next day, and upon the day after that, and upon the day after that, and upon many pleasant days, to hear discourses?” (This with a cow-like lightness.)

Jo, whose immediate object seems to be to get away on any terms, gives a shuffling nod.  Mr. Guppy then throws him a penny, and Mrs. Snagsby calls to Guster to see him safely out of the house.  But before he goes downstairs, Mr. Snagsby loads him with some broken meats from the table, which he carries away, hugging in his arms.

So, Mr. Chadband—­of whom the persecutors say that it is no wonder he should go on for any length of time uttering such abominable nonsense, but that the wonder rather is that he should ever leave off, having once the audacity to begin—­retires into private life until he invests a little capital of supper in the oil-trade.  Jo moves on, through the long vacation, down to Blackfriars Bridge, where he finds a baking stony corner wherein to settle to his repast.

And there he sits, munching and gnawing, and looking up at the great cross on the summit of St. Paul’s Cathedral, glittering above a red-and-violet-tinted cloud of smoke.  From the boy’s face one might suppose that sacred emblem to be, in his eyes, the crowning confusion of the great, confused city—­so golden, so high up, so far out of his reach.  There he sits, the sun going down, the river running fast, the crowd flowing by him in two streams—­everything moving on to some purpose and to one end—­until he is stirred up and told to “move on” too.

CHAPTER XX

A New Lodger

The long vacation saunters on towards term-time like an idle river very leisurely strolling down a flat country to the sea.  Mr. Guppy saunters along with it congenially.  He has blunted the blade of his penknife and broken the point off by sticking that instrument into his desk in every direction.  Not that he bears the desk any ill will, but he must do something, and it must be something of an unexciting nature, which will lay neither his physical nor his intellectual energies under too heavy contribution.  He finds that nothing agrees with him so well as to make little gyrations on one leg of his stool, and stab his desk, and gape.

Kenge and Carboy are out of town, and the articled clerk has taken out a shooting license and gone down to his father’s, and Mr. Guppy’s two fellow-stipendiaries are away on leave.  Mr. Guppy and Mr. Richard Carstone divide the dignity of the office.  But Mr. Carstone is for the time being established in Kenge’s room, whereat Mr. Guppy chafes.  So exceedingly that he with biting sarcasm informs his mother, in the confidential moments when he sups with her off a lobster and lettuce in the Old Street Road, that he is afraid the office is hardly good enough for swells, and that if he had known there was a swell coming, he would have got it painted.