“Perhaps you recollect me?” said Ralph, looking narrowly at the schoolmaster, as the Saracen’s Head.

“You paid me a small account at each of my half-yearly visits to town for some years, I think, sir,” replied Squeers, “for the parents of a boy who, unfortunately——­”

“Unfortunately died at Dotheboys Hall,” said Ralph, finishing the sentence.  “And now let us come to business.  You have advertised for an assistant.  Do you really want one?”

“Certainly,” answered Squeers.

“Here he is!” said Ralph.  “My nephew Nicholas, hot from school, is just the man you want.”

“I am afraid,” said Squeers, perplexed with such an application from a youth of Nicholas’s figure—­“I am afraid the young man won’t suit me.”

“I fear, sir,” said Nicholas, “that you object to my youth, and to not being a Master of Arts?”

“The absence of the college degree is an objection.” replied Squeers, considerably puzzled by the contrast between the simplicity of the nephew and the shrewdness of the uncle.

“Let me have two words with you,” said Ralph.  The two words were had apart; in a couple of minutes Mr. Wackford Squeers’ announced that Mr. Nicholas Nickleby was from that moment installed in the office of first assistant master at Dotheboys Hall.

“At eight o’clock to-morrow morning, Mr. Nickleby,” said Squeers, “the coach starts.  You must be here at a quarter before, as we take some boys with us.”

“And your fare down I have paid,” growled Ralph.  “So you’ll have nothing to do but keep yourself warm.”

II.—­At Dotheboys Hall

“Past seven, Nickleby,” said Mr. Squeers on the first morning after the arrival at Dotheboys Hall.  “Come, tumble up.  Here’s a pretty go, the pump’s froze.  You can’t wash yourself this morning, so you must be content with giving yourself a dry polish till we break the ice in the well, and can get a bucketful out for the boys.”

Nicholas huddled on his clothes and followed Squeers across a yard to the school-room.

“There,” said the schoolmaster, as they stepped in together, “this is our shop.”

It was a bare and dirty room, the windows mostly stopped up with old copybooks and paper, and Nicholas looked with dismay at the old rickety desks and forms.

But the pupils!

Pale and haggard faces, lank and bony figures, boys of stunted growth, and others whose long and meagre legs would hardly bear their stooping bodies.  Faces that told of young lives which from infancy had been one horrible endurance of cruelty and neglect.  Little faces that should have been handsome, darkened with the scowl of sullen, dogged suffering.  And yet, painful as the scene was, it had its grotesque features.

Mrs. Squeers, wearing a beaver bonnet of some antiquity on the top of a nightcap, stood at the desk, presiding over an immense basin of brimstone and treacle.  This compound she administered to each boy in succession, using an enormous wooden spoon for the purpose.