hinking about me?"

"I'm--thinking--how old--you must be."

"You mustn't say such things as that, young gentleman. That'll never
do."

"Why not [slowly and wonderingly]?"

"Never you mind, sir [shorter and sharper than ever]. Remember the
story of the little boy that was gored to death by a mad bull for asking
questions."

"If the bull [in a high falsetto voice and with greater deliberation
than ever] was mad, how did he know that the boy asked questions? Nobody
can go and whisper secrets to a mad bull. I don't believe that story."

Little Dombey's fellow-sufferers at Mrs. Pipchin's were hardly less
ludicrous in their way than that bitter old victim of the Peruvian mines
in her perennial weeds of black bombazeen. Miss Pankey, for instance,
the mild little blue-eyed morsel of a child who was instructed by the
Ogress that "nobody who sniffed before visitors ever went to heaven!"
And her associate in misery, one Master Bitherstone, from India, who
objected so much to the Pipchinian system, that before Little Dombey had
been in the house five minutes, he privately consulted that gentleman
if he could afford him any idea of the way back to Bengal! What the
Pipchinian system was precisely, the Reader indicated perhaps the most
happily by his way of saying, that instead of its encouraging a child's
mind to develop itself, like a flower, it strove to open it by force,
like an oyster. Fading slowly away while he is yet under Mrs. Pipchin's
management, poor little Paul, as the audience well knew, was removed on
to Doctor Blimber's Academy for Young Gentlemen. There the humorous
company gathered around Paul immediately increased. But, before his
going amongst them, the Reader enabled us more vividly to realise, by an
additional touch or two, the significance of the peculiarity of being
"old fashioned," for which the fading child appeared in everybody's eyes
so remarkable.

Wheeled down to the beach in a little invalid-carriage, he would cling
fondly to his sister Florence. He would say to any chance child who
might come to bear him company [in a soft, drawling, half-querulous
voice, and with the gravest look], "Go away, if you please. Thank you,
but I don't want you." He would wonder to himself and to Floy what the
waves were always saying--always saying! At about the middle of the 47th
page of the Reading copy of this book about Little Dombey, the copy
from which Dickens Read, both in England and America, there is, in
hi