Rokesmith was John
Harmon, and how, remembering him as a small boy, she had guessed it
quite early. Then Mrs. Boffin admitted that John, despairing of winning
Bella's heart, and determined that there should be no question of money
in the marriage, he was for going away, and that Noddy said he would
prove that she loved him. "We was all of us in it, my beauty," Mrs.
Boffin concluded, "and when you was married there was we hid up in the
church organ by this husband of yours, for he wouldn't let us out with
it then, as was first meant. But it was Noddy who said that he would
prove you had a true heart of gold. 'If she was to stand up for you when
you was slighted,' he said to John, 'and if she was to do that against
her own interest, how would that do?' 'Do?' says John, 'it would raise
me to the skies.' 'Then,' says my Noddy, 'get ready for the ascent,
John, for up you go. Look out for being slighted and oppressed.' And
then he began. And how he did begin, didn't he?"

"It looks as if old Harmon's spirit had found rest at last, and as if
his money had turned bright again after a long rust in the dark," said
Mrs. Boffin to her husband that night.

"Yes, old lady."

The mystery of the Harmon murder is yet to be explained. John Harmon,
going on shore with a fellow passenger, who greatly resembled him, was
drugged and robbed of his money in a house near the river by this man.
But the robber, who had taken Harmon's clothes, was himself robbed and
thrown into the water, and Harmon recovered consciousness and made his
escape just at the time when the body of his assailant was recovered. In
this state of strange excitement he turned up at the police station,
and, unwilling to reveal his identity at the moment, passed himself off
as Julius Handford.

* * * * *

Pickwick Papers

Dickens first became known to the public through the famous
"Sketches by Boz," which appeared in the "Monthly Magazine" in
December, 1833, the complete series being collected and
published in volume form three years later. This was followed
by the immortal "Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club" in
1836, which soon placed Dickens in the front rank of English
novelists. Frankly humorous as "Pickwick" is, Dickens, in a
preface to a later edition, recorded with satisfaction that
"legal reforms had pared the claws of Messrs. Dodson and
Fogg," that the laws relating t