p. Trump!" he reiterated with a
start, as if the word had stung him--"trump! he was a Brick!"

Then fixing his eyes on mine, dropping his arms, interlacing his fingers
in the manner recorded of Talma in the celebrated "Qu'en dis-tu!" he
resumed in a hollow voice, slow and distinct--

"When--saw--you--him,--young m--m--a--n--nnn?"

Finding the tables thus turned on myself, and not willing to give
Mr. Peac--any clew to poor Vivian (who thus appeared, to my great
satisfaction, to have finally dropped an acquaintance more versatile
than reputable), I contrived, by a few evasive sentences, to keep Mr.
Peac--'s curiosity at a distance till he was summoned in haste to change
his attire for the domestic drama. And so we parted.

CHAPTER. VI.

I hate law details as cordially as my readers can, and therefore I shall
content myself with stating that Mr. Pike's management at the end, not
of three days, but of two weeks, was so admirable that Uncle Jack was
drawn out of prison and my father extracted from all his liabilities
by a sum two thirds less than was first startlingly submitted to our
indignant horror,--and that, too, in a manner that would have satisfied
the conscience of the most punctilious formalist whose contribution
to the national fund for an omitted payment to the Income Tax the
Chancellor of the Exchequer ever had the honor to acknowledge. Still,
the sum was very large in proportion to my poor father's income; and
what with Jack's debts, the claims of the Anti-Publisher Society's
printer, including the very expensive plates that had been so lavishly
bespoken, and in great part completed, for the "History of Human Error,"
and, above all, the liabilities incurred on "The Capitalist;" what with
the plant, as Mr. Peck technically phrased a great upas-tree of a total,
branching out into types, cases, printing-presses, engines, etc., all
now to be resold at a third of their value; what with advertisements
and bills that had covered all the dead-walls by which rubbish might be
shot, throughout the three kingdoms; what with the dues of reporters,
and salaries of writers, who had been engaged for a year at least to
"The Capitalist," and whose claims survived the wretch they had killed
and buried; what, in short, with all that the combined ingenuity of
Uncle Jack and Printer Peck could supply for the utter ruin of the
Caxton family (even after all deductions, curtailments, and after all
that one could extract in th