“Does seem kind of hard; but it’s a righteous good sale.  Shouldn’t wonder if she played the same game on him she did with t’other two fools.  Get her back then, and sell her over again.  Well! come now; there’s no great loss without-some-small-gain!” says Graspum, as, standing his prominent figure in the door of his man pen, he watches the woman pass out of sight, thrusts his hands deep into his breeches pockets, and commences humming an air for his own special amusement.

CHAPTER XLI.

Nicholas’s simple story.

The reader will remember that we left Nicholas seeking his way to Mr. Grabguy’s workshop, situated in the outskirts of the city.  And we must here inform him that considerable change in the social position of the younger Grabguy family has taken place since we left them, which is some years ago.  The elder Grabguy, who, it will be remembered, was very distinguished as his Worship the Mayor of the City (that also was some years ago), has departed this life, leaving the present principal of the Grabguy family a large portion of his estate, which, being mostly of “nigger property,” requires some little transforming before it can be made to suit his more extended business arrangements.  This material addition to the already well-reputed estate of Mr. Grabguy warrants his admittance into very respectable, and, some say, rather distinguished society.  Indeed, it is more than whispered, that when the question of admitting Mr. and Mrs. Grabguy to the membership of a very select circle, the saintly cognomen of which is as indefinable as its system of selecting members, or the angles presented by the nasal organs of a few ladies when anything short of the very first families are proposed, there were seven very fashionable ladies for, and only three against.  The greatest antagonist the Grabguys have to getting into the embrace of this very select circle is Mrs. Chief Justice Pimpkins, a matronly body of some fifty summers, who declares there can be no judge in the world so clever as her own dear Pimpkins, and that society was becoming so vulgar and coarse, and so many low people-whose English was as hopefully bad as could be, and who never spoke when they didn’t impugn her risible nerves-were intruding themselves upon its polished sanctity, that she felt more and more every day the necessity of withdrawing entirely from it, and enjoying her own exclusively distinguished self.  In the case of Grabguy’s admittance to the St. Cecilia, my Lady Pimpkins-she is commonly called Lady Chief Justice Pimpkins-had two most formidable black balls; the first because Mrs. Grabguy’s father was a bread-baker, and the second that the present Grabguy could not be considered a gentleman while he continued in mechanical business.  Another serious objection Mrs. Pimpkins would merely suggest as a preventive;—­such people were ill suited to mix with titled and other