. Send for him, sir, and
ask him what he has to say; he's the man; not me!«
    »What document was it that you had?« asked Ralph, evading, for the moment,
the point just raised.
    »What document? Why, the document,« replied Squeers. »The Madeline
what's-her-name one. It was a will; that's what it was.«
    »Of what nature, whose will, when dated, how benefiting her, to what
extent?« asked Ralph hurriedly.
    »A will in her favour; that's all I know,« rejoined Squeers, »and that's
more than you'd have known, if you'd had them bellows on your head. It's all
owing to your precious caution that they got hold of it. If you had let me burn
it, and taken my word that it was gone, it would have been a heap of ashes
behind the fire, instead of being whole and sound, inside of my great-coat.«
    »Beaten at every point!« muttered Ralph.
    »Ah!« sighed Squeers, who, between the brandy and water and his broken head,
wandered strangely, »at the delightful village of Dotheboys near Greta Bridge in
Yorkshire, youth are boarded, clothed, booked, washed, furnished with
pocket-money, provided with all necessaries, instructed in all languages living
and dead, mathematics, orthography, geometry, astronomy, trigonometry - this is
a altered state of trigonomics, this is! A double l - all, everything - a
cobbler's weapon. U-p-up, adjective, not down. S-q-u-double e-r-s Squeers, noun
substantive, a educator of youth. Total, all up with Squeers!«
    His running on, in this way, had afforded Ralph an opportunity of recovering
his presence of mind, which at once suggested to him the necessity of removing,
as far as possible, the schoolmaster's misgivings, and leading him to believe
that his safety and best policy lay in the preservation of a rigid silence.
    »I tell you, once again,« he said, »they can't hurt you. You shall have an
action for false imprisonment, and make a profit of this, yet. We will devise a
story for you that should carry you through twenty times such a trivial scrape
as this; and if they want security in a thousand pounds for your reappearance in
case you
