at arm's length
above the centre of the table, by that gesture invited the other three to add
theirs, and to unite in a general conspiratorial clink. The ceremony was
effective up to a certain point, and would have been wholly so throughout, if
Miss Rugg, as she raised her glass to her lips in completion of it, had not
happened to look at Young John; when she was again so overcome by the
contemptible comicality of his disinterestedness, as to splutter some ambrosial
drops of rum and water around, and withdraw in confusion.
    Such was the dinner without precedent, given by Pancks at Pentonville; and
such was the busy and strange life Pancks led. The only waking moments at which
he appeared to relax from his cares, and to recreate himself by going anywhere
or saying anything without a pervading object, were when he showed a dawning
interest in the lame foreigner with the stick, down Bleeding Heart Yard.
    The foreigner, by name John Baptist Cavalletto - they called him Mr. Baptist
in the Yard - was such a chirping, easy, hopeful little fellow, that his
attraction for Pancks was probably in the force of contrast. Solitary, weak, and
scantily acquainted with the most necessary words of the only language in which
he could communicate with the people about him, he went with the stream of his
fortunes, in a brisk way that was new in those parts. With little to eat and
less to drink, and nothing to wear but what he wore upon him, or had brought
tied up in one of the smallest bundles that ever were seen, he put as bright a
face upon it as if he were in the most flourishing circumstances, when he first
hobbled up and down the Yard, humbly propitiating the general good-will with his
white teeth.
    It was up-hill work for a foreigner, lame or sound, to make his way with the
Bleeding Hearts. In the first place, they were vaguely persuaded that every
foreigner had a knife about him; in the second, they held it to be a sound
constitutional national axiom that he ought to go home to his own country. They
never thought of inquiring how many of their own countrymen would be returned
upon their hands from divers parts of the world, if the principle were generally
recognised; they considered it practically and peculiarly British. In the third
place, they had a notion that it was a sort of Divine visitation upon a
foreigner that he was not an Englishman, and that all kinds of calamities
happened to his country because it did things that England did not, and did not