answer, an emphatic nod and a broad grin.

The Captain replied with a nod and a wink, whereupon the other retired
behind his patron, for the purpose of giving himself a quiet hug of
delight, in which act, however, he was caught; the Captain being one who
always, according to his own showing, kept his weather-eye open.

"W'y, what's the matter with you, boy?"

"Pains in the stummick is aggrawatin' sometimes," answered Gillie.

"You haven't got 'em, have you?"

"Well, I can't exactly go for to say as I has," answered Gillie, with
another grin.

"Now, look 'ee here, youngster," said the Captain, suddenly seizing the
spider by his collar and trousers, and swinging him as though about to
hurl him through the window into the river, "if you go an' let your
tongue wag in regard to this matter, out you go, right through the
port-hole--d'ee see?"

He set the spider quietly on his legs again, who replied, with unruffled
coolness--

"Mum's the word, Cappen."

Gillie had been shorn of his blue tights and brass buttons, poor Mrs
Stoutley having found it absolutely necessary, on her return home, to
dismiss all her servants, dispose of all her belongings, and retire into
the privacy of a poor lodging in a back street. Thus the spider had
come to be suddenly thrown on the world again, but Captain Wopper had
retained him, he said, as a mixture of errand-boy, cabin-boy, and
powder-monkey, in which capacity he dwelt with his mother during the
night and revolved like a satellite round the Captain during the day. A
suit of much more appropriate pepper-and-salt had replaced the blue
tights and buttons. Altogether, his _tout-ensemble_ was what the
Captain styled "more ship-shape."

We have said that Mrs Stoutley and her family had made a descent in
life. As poor Lewis remarked, with a sad smile, they had quitted the
gay and glittering heights, and gone, like a magnificent avalanche, down
into the moraine. Social, not less than physical, avalanches multiply
their parts and widen their course during descent. The Stoutleys did
not fall alone. A green-grocer, a shoemaker, and a baker, who had long
been trembling, like human boulders, on the precipice of bankruptcy,
went tumbling down along with them, and found rest in a lower part of
the moraine than they had previously occupied.

"It's a sad business," said Lewis to Dr Lawrence one morning; "and if
you continue to attend me, you must do so without the most distant
prospect of