er, and
the other neighbours opined that he was a kind of general agent; both
of which guesses were as correct and definite as guesses about other
people's affairs usually are, or need to be.

Mr Ralph Nickleby sat in his private office one morning, ready dressed
to walk abroad. He wore a bottle-green spencer over a blue coat; a white
waistcoat, grey mixture pantaloons, and Wellington boots drawn over
them. The corner of a small-plaited shirt-frill struggled out, as if
insisting to show itself, from between his chin and the top button of
his spencer; and the latter garment was not made low enough to conceal
a long gold watch-chain, composed of a series of plain rings, which had
its beginning at the handle of a gold repeater in Mr Nickleby's pocket,
and its termination in two little keys: one belonging to the watch
itself, and the other to some patent padlock. He wore a sprinkling of
powder upon his head, as if to make himself look benevolent; but if
that were his purpose, he would perhaps have done better to powder his
countenance also, for there was something in its very wrinkles, and
in his cold restless eye, which seemed to tell of cunning that would
announce itself in spite of him. However this might be, there he was;
and as he was all alone, neither the powder, nor the wrinkles, nor the
eyes, had the smallest effect, good or bad, upon anybody just then, and
are consequently no business of ours just now.

Mr Nickleby closed an account-book which lay on his desk, and, throwing
himself back in his chair, gazed with an air of abstraction through the
dirty window. Some London houses have a melancholy little plot of ground
behind them, usually fenced in by four high whitewashed walls, and
frowned upon by stacks of chimneys: in which there withers on, from
year to year, a crippled tree, that makes a show of putting forth a few
leaves late in autumn when other trees shed theirs, and, drooping in
the effort, lingers on, all crackled and smoke-dried, till the following
season, when it repeats the same process, and perhaps, if the weather
be particularly genial, even tempts some rheumatic sparrow to chirrup
in its branches. People sometimes call these dark yards 'gardens'; it
is not supposed that they were ever planted, but rather that they are
pieces of unreclaimed land, with the withered vegetation of the original
brick-field. No man thinks of walking in this desolate place, or of
turning it to any account. A few hampers,