I asked Uriah if he had been with Mr. Wickfield long.

“I have been with him going on four years, Master Copperfield,” said Uriah, “since a year after my father’s death.  How much I have to be thankful for in that!  How much have I to be thankful for in Mr. Wickfield’s kind intention to give me my articles, which would otherwise not lay within the ’umble means of mother and self!”

“Perhaps, when you’re a regular lawyer, you’ll be a partner in Mr. Wickfield’s business, one of these days,” I said to make myself agreeable; “and it will be Wickfield and Heep or Heep late Wickfield.”

“Oh, no, Master Copperfield,” returned Uriah, shaking his head, “I am much too ’umble for that!”

It must have been five or six years later, when I was in London, that Uriah recalled my prophecy to me.

Agnes had noticed as I had noticed, long before this, a gradual alteration in Mr. Wickfield.  He sat longer and longer over his wine, and it was at such times, when his hands trembled, and his speech was not plain, that Uriah was most certain to want him on some business.

So it came about that Agnes had to tell me that Uriah had made himself indispensable to her father.

“He is subtle and watchful,” she said.  “He has mastered papa’s weaknesses, fostered them, and taken advantage of them, until papa is afraid of him.”

If I was indignant to hear that Uriah had wormed himself into such promotion, I restrained my feelings when we met, for Agnes had bidden me not to repel him, for her father’s sake, and for her own.

“What a prophet you have shown yourself, Master Copperfield!” said Uriah, reminding me of my early words.  “You may not recollect it; but when a person is ’umble, a person treasures such things up.  But the ’umblest persons, Master Copperfield, may be instruments of good.  I am glad to think I have been the instrument of good to Mr. Wickfield, and that I may be more so.  Oh, what a worthy man he is; but how imprudent he has been!”

When the rascal went on to tell me confidentially that he “loved the ground his Agnes walked on,” and that he thought she might come to be kind to him, knowing his usefulness to her father, I had a delirious idea of seizing the red-hot poker out of the fire and running him through with it.  However, I thought of Agnes, and could say nothing.  In the end all the evil machinations of Uriah Heep were frustrated by my old friend Mr. Micawber, who, visiting Canterbury on the chance of something suitable turning up, and meeting me in Heep’s company, was subsequently engaged by Heep as a clerk at twenty-two and sixpence per week.

It was only after Micawber had found that Uriah Heep had forged Mr. Wickfield’s name to various documents, and had fraudulently speculated with moneys entrusted by my aunt, amongst others, to his partner, that he turned upon him and denounced him, and accomplished what he called “the final pulverisation of Keep.”