the paper,« says Mr. Guppy. »He shall bring it down. But you
had better not be seen about here. Sit on our staircase and read. It's a quiet
place.«
    Jobling nods intelligence and acquiescence. The sagacious Smallweed supplies
him with the newspaper, and occasionally drops his eye upon him from the landing
as a precaution against his becoming disgusted with waiting, and making an
untimely departure. At last the enemy retreats, and then Smallweed fetches Mr.
Jobling up.
    »Well, and how are you?« says Mr. Guppy, shaking hands with him.
    »So, so. How are you?«
    Mr. Guppy replying that he is not much to boast of, Mr. Jobling ventures on
the question, »How is she?« This Mr. Guppy resents as a liberty; retorting,
»Jobling, there are chords in the human mind -« Jobling begs pardon.
    »Any subject but that!« says Mr. Guppy, with a gloomy enjoyment of his
injury. »For there are chords, Jobling -«
    Mr. Jobling begs pardon again.
    During this short colloquy, the active Smallweed, who is of the dinner
party, has written in legal characters on a slip of paper, »Return immediately.«
This notification to all whom it may concern, he inserts in the letter-box; and
then putting on the tall hat, at the angle of inclination at which Mr. Guppy
wears his, informs his patron that they may now make themselves scarce.
    Accordingly they betake themselves to a neighbouring dining-house, of the
class known among its frequenters by the denomination Slap-Bang, where the
waitress, a bouncing young female of forty, is supposed to have made some
impression on the susceptible Smallweed; of whom it may be remarked that he is a
weird changeling, to whom years are nothing. He stands precociously possessed of
centuries of owlish wisdom. If he ever lay in a cradle, it seems as if he must
have lain there in a tail-coat. He has an old, old eye, has Smallweed: and he
drinks and smokes, in a monkeyish way; and his neck is stiff in his collar; and
he is never to be taken in; and he knows all about it, whatever it is. In short,
in his bringing up, he has been so nursed by Law and Equity that he has become a
kind of fossil Imp, to account for whose terrestrial existence it is reported at
the public offices that his father was John Doe, and his mother the only