And the house which John and Bella visited next day was none other than the Boffins’, and when they arrived, there were Mr. and Mrs. Boffin beaming at them.  Mrs. Boffin told Bella that John Rokesmith was John Harmon, and how, remembering him as a small boy, she had guessed it quite early.  Then Mrs. Boffin admitted that John, despairing of winning Bella’s heart, and determined that there should be no question of money in the marriage, he was for going away, and that Noddy said he would prove that she loved him.  “We was all of us in it, my beauty,” Mrs. Boffin concluded, “and when you was married there was we hid up in the church organ by this husband of yours, for he wouldn’t let us out with it then, as was first meant.  But it was Noddy who said that he would prove you had a true heart of gold.  ’If she was to stand up for you when you was slighted,’ he said to John, ’and if she was to do that against her own interest, how would that do?’ ‘Do?’ says John, ’it would raise me to the skies.’  ‘Then,’ says my Noddy, ’get ready for the ascent, John, for up you go.  Look out for being slighted and oppressed.’  And then he began.  And how he did begin, didn’t he?”

“It looks as if old Harmon’s spirit had found rest at last, and as if his money had turned bright again after a long rust in the dark,” said Mrs. Boffin to her husband that night.

“Yes, old lady.”

The mystery of the Harmon murder is yet to be explained.  John Harmon, going on shore with a fellow passenger, who greatly resembled him, was drugged and robbed of his money in a house near the river by this man.  But the robber, who had taken Harmon’s clothes, was himself robbed and thrown into the water, and Harmon recovered consciousness and made his escape just at the time when the body of his assailant was recovered.  In this state of strange excitement he turned up at the police station, and, unwilling to reveal his identity at the moment, passed himself off as Julius Handford.

* * * * *

Pickwick Papers

      Dickens first became known to the public through the famous
     “Sketches by Boz,” which appeared in the “Monthly Magazine” in
     December, 1833, the complete series being collected and
     published in volume form three years later.  This was followed
     by the immortal “Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club” in
     1836, which soon placed Dickens in the front rank of English
     novelists.  Frankly humorous as “Pickwick” is, Dickens, in a
     preface to a later edition, recorded with satisfaction that
     “legal reforms had pared the claws of Messrs. Dodson and
     Fogg,” that the laws relating to imprisonment for debt had
     been altered, and the Fleet Prison pulled down.

I.—­Mr. Pickwick Engages Sam Weller

Mr. Pickwick’s apartments in Goswell Street were of a very neat and comfortable description, peculiarly adapted for a man of his genius and observation, and importance as General Chairman of the world-famed Pickwick Club.