-wick.

"But to be sure it's no business of mine," said Barbox Brothers. "That
was an impertinent observation on my part. Be what you like."

"Some people, sir," remarked Lamps, in a tone of apology, "are sometimes
what they don't like."

"Nobody knows that better than I do," sighed the other. "I have been
what I don't like, all my life."

"When I first took, sir," resumed Lamps, "to composing little
Comic-Songs-like--"

Barbox Brothers eyed him with great disfavour.

"--To composing little Comic-Songs-like--and what was more hard--to
singing 'em afterwards," said Lamps, "it went against the grain at that
time, it did indeed."

Something that was not all oil here shining in Lamps's eye, Barbox
Brothers withdrew his own a little disconcerted, looked at the fire, and
put a foot on the top bar. "Why did you do it, then?" he asked, after a
short pause; abruptly enough but in a softer tone. "If you didn't want
to do it, why did you do it? Where did you sing them? Public-house?"

To which Mr. Lamps returned the curious reply: "Bedside."

At this moment, while the traveller looked at him for elucidation, Mugby
Junction started suddenly, trembled violently, and opened its gas eyes.
"She's got up!" Lamps announced, excited. "What lays in her power is
sometimes more, and sometimes less; but it's laid in her power to get up
to-night, by George!"

The legend "Barbox Brothers" in large white letters on two black
surfaces, was very soon afterwards trundling on a truck through a silent
street, and, when the owner of the legend had shivered on the pavement
half an hour, what time the porter's knocks at the Inn Door knocked up
the whole town first, and the Inn last, he groped his way into the close
air of a shut-up house, and so groped between the sheets of a shut-up bed
that seemed to have been expressly refrigerated for him when last made.

II

"You remember me, Young Jackson?"

"What do I remember if not you? You are my first remembrance. It was
you who told me that was my name. It was you who told me that on every
twentieth of December my life had a penitential anniversary in it called
a birthday. I suppose the last communication was truer than the first!"

"What am I like, Young Jackson?"

"You are like a blight all through the year, to me. You hard-lined,
thin-lipped, repressive, changeless woman with a wax mask on. You are
like the Devil to me; most of all when you teach me religious things,