yer's door and whenever he came out would follow him.

Wrayburn soon discovered this and delighted to fool his enemy. Every
night he would take a new direction and lead his pursuer for hours about
the city. So that in a few weeks Headstone became almost insane with
murderous anger and disappointment.

So things went on for a long while. Lizzie continued to love Eugene
Wrayburn, who kept trying in every way to find her. Headstone, the
schoolmaster, kept watching him and meditating evil. The little dolls'
dressmaker worked on cheerily every day in the city, and in their fine
house Mr. and Mrs. Boffin grew fonder and fonder of Miss Bella, whom
John Rokesmith, the secretary, thought more beautiful every day.

III

THE RISE AND FALL OF SILAS WEGG

The wooden-legged ballad seller whom Mr. Boffin had hired to read to him
was a sly, dishonest rascal named Silas Wegg, who soon made up his mind
to get all the money he could out of his employer.

There is an old story of a camel who once asked a shopkeeper to let him
put his nose in at the shop door to warm it. The shopkeeper consented,
and little by little the camel got his head, then his neck, then his
shoulders and at last his whole body into the shop, so that there was no
room for the poor shopkeeper, who had to sit outside in the cold. Wegg
soon began to act like the camel and took such advantage of easy-going
Mr. Boffin that the latter at last let him live rent-free in the house
amid the dust heaps, which he himself had occupied before he got old
Harmon's money.

Wegg imagined the mounds contained treasures hidden by the old man and
thought it would be a fine thing to cheat Mr. Boffin out of them. So
every night he spent hours prodding the heaps. Finally he persuaded a
Mr. Venus (a man who had been disappointed in love and made a melancholy
living by stringing skeletons together on wires), to become his partner
in the search.

One day Wegg really did find something. It was a parchment hidden in an
empty pump, and he soon saw that it was a second will of old Harmon's,
later than the one already known, leaving the whole fortune, not to the
son at all, but to the Crown.

When Wegg saw this his hypocritical soul swelled with joy, for he
thought, sooner than give up all the money to the Crown, Mr. Boffin
would pay him a great deal to destroy this new will. He was such a
rascal himself that it never occurred to him that maybe Mr. Boffin would
prefer to be honest. He t