las's benefactors

Bray A spendthrift and invalid

Madeline His daughter

Gride A miser

NICHOLAS NICKLEBY

I

NICHOLAS AT DOTHEBOYS HALL

Once on a time, in England, there were two brothers named Nickleby who
had grown up to be very different men. Ralph was a rich and miserly
money-lender who gained his wealth by persecuting the poor of London--a
thin, cold-hearted, crafty man with a cruel smile. The other, who lived
in the country, was generous but poor, so that when he died he left his
wife and two children, Nicholas and Kate, with hardly a penny to keep
them from starving.

In their trouble the mother decided to go and try to obtain help from
her husband's brother, Ralph Nickleby.

Ralph was angry when he learned they had come to London, for he loved
his gold better than anything else in the world. He lived in Golden
Square, a very rich part of the city, in a great fine house, all alone
save for one servant, and he kept only one clerk.

This clerk, who was named Noggs, had one glass eye and long, bony
fingers which he had an uncomfortable habit of cracking together when he
spoke to any one. He had once been rich, but he had given his money to
Ralph Nickleby to invest for him, and the money-lender had ended by
getting it all, so that the poor man at last had to become the other's
clerk. When he first saw Nicholas and Kate, Noggs was sorry enough for
them, because he knew it would be little help they would get from their
stingy uncle.

Nicholas was proud-mettled, and his very bearing angered the
money-lender. He called him a young puppy, and a pauper besides, to
which Nicholas replied with heat and spirit. His mother succeeded in
smoothing things over for the time, and though Ralph Nickleby from that
moment hated the boy, he grudgingly promised her to get him a situation
as a teacher.

The school the miser selected was one called Dotheboys Hall, a long,
cold-looking, tumble-down building, one story high, in a dreary part of
the country. It belonged to a man named Squeers, a burly, ruffianly
hypocrite, who pretended to the world to be a kind, fatherly master, but
in fact treated his pupils with such cruelty that almost the only ones
ever sent there were poor little orphans, whose guardians were glad to
get rid of them. Squeers had an oily, wrinkled face and flat sh