“And there you sit, I suppose, all the day long, eh?” says Mr. George with folded arms.

“Just so, just so,” the old man nods.

“And don’t you occupy yourself at all?”

“I watch the fire—­and the boiling and the roasting—­”

“When there is any,” says Mr. George with great expression.

“Just so.  When there is any.”

“Don’t you read or get read to?”

The old man shakes his head with sharp sly triumph.  “No, no.  We have never been readers in our family.  It don’t pay.  Stuff.  Idleness.  Folly.  No, no!”

“There’s not much to choose between your two states,” says the visitor in a key too low for the old man’s dull hearing as he looks from him to the old woman and back again.  “I say!” in a louder voice.

“I hear you.”

“You’ll sell me up at last, I suppose, when I am a day in arrear.”

“My dear friend!” cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him.  “Never!  Never, my dear friend!  But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money—­he might!”

“Oh!  You can’t answer for him?” says Mr. George, finishing the inquiry in his lower key with the words “You lying old rascal!”

“My dear friend, he is not to be depended on.  I wouldn’t trust him.  He will have his bond, my dear friend.”

“Devil doubt him,” says Mr. George.  Charley appearing with a tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy-and-water, he asks her, “How do you come here!  You haven’t got the family face.”

“I goes out to work, sir,” returns Charley.

The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head.  “You give the house almost a wholesome look.  It wants a bit of youth as much as it wants fresh air.”  Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed’s friend in the city—­ the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman’s imagination.

“So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?”

“I think he might—­I am afraid he would.  I have known him do it,” says Grandfather Smallweed incautiously, “twenty times.”

Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers “Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent, twenty—­” and is then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face as it crushes her in the usual manner.

“You’re a brimstone idiot.  You’re a scorpion—­a brimstone scorpion!  You’re a sweltering toad.  You’re a chattering clattering broomstick witch that ought to be burnt!” gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair.  “My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?”