ingly, to Nicholas, across the bread-and-butter plate which they
had just been emptying between them, "Ye wean't get bread-and-butther
ev'ry neight, I expect, mun. Ecod, they dean't put too much intif 'em.
Ye'll be nowt but skeen and boans if you stop here long eneaf. Ho! ho!
ho!"--all this to Nicholas's unspeakable indignation. Or, another while,
after chafing in jealousy for a long time over the coquetries going on
between Tilda Price and Nicholas--the Yorkshireman flattening his own
nose with his clenched fist again and again, "as if to keep his hand in
till he had an opportunity of exercising it on the nose of some other
gentleman,"--until asked merrily by his betrothed to keep his glum
silence no longer, but to say something: "Say summat?" roared John
Browdie, with a mighty blow on the table; "Weal, then! what I say 's
this--Dang my boans and boddy, if I stan' this ony longer! Do ye gang
whoam wi' me; and do yon loight and toight young whipster look sharp out
for a brokken head next time he cums under my hond. Cum whoam, tell'e,
cum whoam!" After Smike's running away, and his being brought back
again, had been rapidly recounted, what nearly every individual member
of every audience in attendance at this Reading was eagerly on the watch
for all along, at last, in the fullness of time, arrived,--the execrable
Squeers receiving, instead of administering, a frightful beating, in the
presence of the whole school; having carefully provided himself
beforehand, as all were rejoiced to remember, with "a fearful instrument
of flagellation, strong, supple, wax-ended, and new!"

So real are the characters described by Charles Dickens in his life-like
fictions, and so exactly do the incidents he relates as having befallen
them resemble actual occurrences, that we recall to recollection at this
moment the delight with which the late accomplished Lady Napier once
related an exact case in point, appealing, as she did so, to her
husband, the author of the "Peninsular War," to corroborate the-accuracy
of her retrospect! Telling how she perfectly well remembered, when the
fourth green number of "Nicholas Nickleby" was just out, one of her
home group, who had a moment before caught sight of the picture of the
flogging in a shop-window, rushed in with the startling announcement--as
though he were bringing with him the news of some great victory--"What
do you think? _Nicholas has thrashed Squeers!_" As the Novelist read
this chapter, or