d sent him the
bank-note. And, won by Tom Pinch's goodness and honor, it was he who
now, secretly, made him this position. If Pecksniff had guessed all
this, he would probably have had a stroke of apoplexy.

III

JONAS GETS RID OF AN ENEMY

Jonas, meanwhile, in his miserly soul, had been wishing that his old
father would hurry and die. He wanted the money and he wanted to marry
Mercy Pecksniff, and to do both he preferred the old man out of his way.
He thought of this and wished it so long that at last he began to think
of helping the matter along.

His father kept in a drawer some cough lozenges which he constantly
used. Jonas at last bought some poison from a dissipated man who needed
money badly, and made some lozenges like them. These he put in his
father's drawer instead of the others.

His father, however, and Chuffey, the old clerk, noticed that the
lozenges were not the same, and they guessed what Jonas had done. The
shock of discovering that his own son had tried to murder him proved the
old man's death. He made Chuffey promise not to betray Jonas, then fell
in a fit and never spoke again.

Jonas naturally thought the poison had done the work, and was at first
in dreadful fear of discovery. He made a fine funeral, with four-horse
coaches, velvet trappings and silver plate, so that people would think
he loved his father, and not till the body was buried did he forget his
dread.

Chuffey, however, seemed to go almost daft. He would walk and cry and
wring his hands and talk so strangely about his master's death that
Jonas feared he would cause suspicion that all was not right. So he
hired a nurse to come and keep him in his room.

This nurse went by the name of "Sairey" Gamp. She was a fat old woman,
with a red face, a husky voice and a moist eye, which often turned up so
as to show only the white. Wherever she went she carried a faded
umbrella with a round white patch on top, and she always smelled of
whisky. Mrs. Gamp was fond of talking of a certain "Mrs. Harris," whom
she spoke of as a dear friend, but whom nobody else had ever seen. When
she wanted to say something nice of herself she would put it in the
mouth of Mrs. Harris. She was always quoting, "I says to Mrs. Harris,"
or "Mrs. Harris says to me." People used to say there was no such person
at all, but this never failed to make Mrs. Gamp very angry.

She was a cruel nurse, and her way of making a sick man swallow a dose
of medicine was by c