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you want to come Billy the Conqueror over us? 'Answer my question.' A fructifying tyrant could say no more to his slave. I'm the slave of no man: not a farthing's-worth of it. Come to fair argument, and I am your man. I'll go with you into the history of the world; but if you want to come any of your haughty aristocracy, it won't do for me, mind you that."

"Obadiah," said Quocks, "you're a fool. I don't flatter you when I say that you're only one remove from an idiot; because I'd much rather talk with an idiot than with you. Independently of which, an idiot—a perfect idiot—is infinitely more harmless. You take delight in stabbing the reputation of those around you: you glory in the practice of founding falsehoods upon truth: you are too vain to see that you are despised, and too ignorant even to know that you are ignorant: you are one of society's butts—a creature who has not a single friend in the world, for what man in the world can feel justified in either opening his heart to you, or trusting you with a secret?—you are a dangerous man, Obadiah—dangerous not because you have any high intellectual power, but because you are utterly destitute of it. I don't mean to I don't mean to say that you are malignant. No: you are ten times worse than a man who is actuated by malignity: you have not the tact to perceive what is calculated to injure a man, and what is not. You lose friends, Obadiah, as fast as you make them, because they soon find that you are not to be trusted."

"Well," said Obadiah, "you have been fructifying, certainly, to an amalgamating extent. Have you done?"

"Quite. My object is merely to induce you to study your own character."

"Thank you: you're very kind, you always were; but I know my own character as well as any man in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America."

"I am very sorry for it."

"No doubt. But just look you here: just allow me, if you've done now, to ask you one question. You said just now that I take a delight in stabbing the reputation of those around me. Mark you that!—those were the very words you put in juxtaposition."

"Well."

"Well, just look you here, now; whose reputation have I ever endeavoured to stab?"

"Whose reputation have you not? That's the exception, if there be one: the other's the rule."

'Well, but whose reputation have I been endeavouring to stab now?"

"That of a lady, whose goodness is known and appreciated by all but you, and that of a gentleman—for he is a gentleman—whose honour and benevolence none but you ever doubted."

"I deny it!"

"Deny what?"

"Deny what? Deny that I've been endeavouring—"

"Oh!" exclaimed Pokey, with uplifted hands; "Oh!"

"Oh! you fool: what do you mean by oh!"

"Didn't you walk in before Quocks came!"

"But I'm speaking of now! It has been said that—when I made the