Mr. and Mrs. Snagsby are not only one bone and one flesh, but, to the neighbours’ thinking, one voice too.  That voice, appearing to proceed from Mrs. Snagsby alone, is heard in Cook’s Court very often.  Mr. Snagsby, otherwise than as he finds expression through these dulcet tones, is rarely heard.  He is a mild, bald, timid man with a shining head and a scrubby clump of black hair sticking out at the back.  He tends to meekness and obesity.  As he stands at his door in Cook’s Court in his grey shop-coat and black calico sleeves, looking up at the clouds, or stands behind a desk in his dark shop with a heavy flat ruler, snipping and slicing at sheepskin in company with his two ’prentices, he is emphatically a retiring and unassuming man.  From beneath his feet, at such times, as from a shrill ghost unquiet in its grave, there frequently arise complainings and lamentations in the voice already mentioned; and haply, on some occasions when these reach a sharper pitch than usual, Mr. Snagsby mentions to the ’prentices, “I think my little woman is a-giving it to Guster!”

This proper name, so used by Mr. Snagsby, has before now sharpened the wit of the Cook’s Courtiers to remark that it ought to be the name of Mrs. Snagsby, seeing that she might with great force and expression be termed a Guster, in compliment to her stormy character.  It is, however, the possession, and the only possession except fifty shillings per annum and a very small box indifferently filled with clothing, of a lean young woman from a workhouse (by some supposed to have been christened Augusta) who, although she was farmed or contracted for during her growing time by an amiable benefactor of his species resident at Tooting, and cannot fail to have been developed under the most favourable circumstances, “has fits,” which the parish can’t account for.

Guster, really aged three or four and twenty, but looking a round ten years older, goes cheap with this unaccountable drawback of fits, and is so apprehensive of being returned on the hands of her patron saint that except when she is found with her head in the pail, or the sink, or the copper, or the dinner, or anything else that happens to be near her at the time of her seizure, she is always at work.  She is a satisfaction to the parents and guardians of the ’prentices, who feel that there is little danger of her inspiring tender emotions in the breast of youth; she is a satisfaction to Mrs. Snagsby, who can always find fault with her; she is a satisfaction to Mr. Snagsby, who thinks it a charity to keep her.  The law-stationer’s establishment is, in Guster’s eyes, a temple of plenty and splendour.  She believes the little drawing-room upstairs, always kept, as one may say, with its hair in papers and its pinafore on, to be the most elegant apartment in Christendom.  The view it commands of Cook’s Court at one end (not to mention a squint into Cursitor Street) and of Coavinses’ the sheriff’s officer’s backyard at the other she regards as a prospect of unequalled beauty.  The portraits it displays in oil—­and plenty of it too—­of Mr. Snagsby looking at Mrs. Snagsby and of Mrs. Snagsby looking at Mr. Snagsby are in her eyes as achievements of Raphael or Titian.  Guster has some recompenses for her many privations.