Charles Dickens: The Life and Adventures of Nicholas Nickleby

CHAPTER 57: How Ralph Nickleby's Auxiliary went about his Work... (continued)

Making a halt in his reflections at this place, Mr Squeers again put his glass to his lips, and drawing a dirty letter from his pocket, proceeded to con over its contents with the air of a man who had read it very often, and now refreshed his memory rather in the absence of better amusement than for any specific information.

'The pigs is well,' said Mr Squeers, 'the cows is well, and the boys is bobbish. Young Sprouter has been a-winking, has he? I'll wink him when I get back. "Cobbey would persist in sniffing while he was a-eating his dinner, and said that the beef was so strong it made him."--Very good, Cobbey, we'll see if we can't make you sniff a little without beef. "Pitcher was took with another fever,"--of course he was--"and being fetched by his friends, died the day after he got home,"--of course he did, and out of aggravation; it's part of a deep-laid system. There an't another chap in the school but that boy as would have died exactly at the end of the quarter: taking it out of me to the very last, and then carrying his spite to the utmost extremity. "The juniorest Palmer said he wished he was in Heaven." I really don't know, I do NOT know what's to be done with that young fellow; he's always a-wishing something horrid. He said once, he wished he was a donkey, because then he wouldn't have a father as didn't love him! Pretty wicious that for a child of six!'

Mr Squeers was so much moved by the contemplation of this hardened nature in one so young, that he angrily put up the letter, and sought, in a new train of ideas, a subject of consolation.