avement as if it were red hot. Without further
interruption, we reached the front office, where we found the clerk and
the man in velveteen with the fur cap.

"Here's Mike," said the clerk, getting down from his stool, and
approaching Mr. Jaggers confidentially.

"Oh!" said Mr. Jaggers, turning to the man, who was pulling a lock of
hair in the middle of his forehead, like the Bull in Cock Robin pulling
at the bell-rope; "your man comes on this afternoon. Well?"

"Well, Mas'r Jaggers," returned Mike, in the voice of a sufferer from a
constitutional cold; "arter a deal o' trouble, I've found one, sir, as
might do."

"What is he prepared to swear?"

"Well, Mas'r Jaggers," said Mike, wiping his nose on his fur cap this
time; "in a general way, anythink."

Mr. Jaggers suddenly became most irate. "Now, I warned you before," said
he, throwing his forefinger at the terrified client, "that if you ever
presumed to talk in that way here, I'd make an example of you. You
infernal scoundrel, how dare you tell ME that?"

The client looked scared, but bewildered too, as if he were unconscious
what he had done.

"Spooney!" said the clerk, in a low voice, giving him a stir with his
elbow. "Soft Head! Need you say it face to face?"

"Now, I ask you, you blundering booby," said my guardian, very sternly,
"once more and for the last time, what the man you have brought here is
prepared to swear?"

Mike looked hard at my guardian, as if he were trying to learn a lesson
from his face, and slowly replied, "Ayther to character, or to having
been in his company and never left him all the night in question."

"Now, be careful. In what station of life is this man?"

Mike looked at his cap, and looked at the floor, and looked at the
ceiling, and looked at the clerk, and even looked at me, before
beginning to reply in a nervous manner, "We've dressed him up like--"
when my guardian blustered out,--

"What? You WILL, will you?"

("Spooney!" added the clerk again, with another stir.)

After some helpless casting about, Mike brightened and began again:--

"He is dressed like a 'spectable pieman. A sort of a pastry-cook."

"Is he here?" asked my guardian.

"I left him," said Mike, "a setting on some doorsteps round the corner."

"Take him past that window, and let me see him."

The window indicated was the office window. We all three went to
it, behind the wire blind, and presently saw the client go by in an
accidental manner, wi