adjustment of some youthful differences, by means
of a pugilistic contest across the table, which, on the approach of
their honoured parent, subsided into a noiseless exchange of kicks
beneath it.

And, in this place, it may be as well to apprise the reader, that Miss
Fanny Squeers was in her three-and-twentieth year. If there be any one
grace or loveliness inseparable from that particular period of life,
Miss Squeers may be presumed to have been possessed of it, as there is
no reason to suppose that she was a solitary exception to an universal
rule. She was not tall like her mother, but short like her father; from
the former she inherited a voice of harsh quality; from the latter a
remarkable expression of the right eye, something akin to having none at
all.

Miss Squeers had been spending a few days with a neighbouring friend,
and had only just returned to the parental roof. To this circumstance
may be referred, her having heard nothing of Nicholas, until Mr Squeers
himself now made him the subject of conversation.

'Well, my dear,' said Squeers, drawing up his chair, 'what do you think
of him by this time?'

'Think of who?' inquired Mrs Squeers; who (as she often remarked) was no
grammarian, thank Heaven.

'Of the young man--the new teacher--who else could I mean?'

'Oh! that Knuckleboy,' said Mrs Squeers impatiently. 'I hate him.'

'What do you hate him for, my dear?' asked Squeers.

'What's that to you?' retorted Mrs Squeers. 'If I hate him, that's
enough, ain't it?'

'Quite enough for him, my dear, and a great deal too much I dare say,
if he knew it,' replied Squeers in a pacific tone. 'I only ask from
curiosity, my dear.'

'Well, then, if you want to know,' rejoined Mrs Squeers, 'I'll tell you.
Because he's a proud, haughty, consequential, turned-up-nosed peacock.'

Mrs Squeers, when excited, was accustomed to use strong language, and,
moreover, to make use of a plurality of epithets, some of which were of
a figurative kind, as the word peacock, and furthermore the allusion
to Nicholas's nose, which was not intended to be taken in its literal
sense, but rather to bear a latitude of construction according to the
fancy of the hearers.

Neither were they meant to bear reference to each other, so much as to
the object on whom they were bestowed, as will be seen in the present
case: a peacock with a turned-up nose being a novelty in ornithology,
and a thing not commonly seen.

'Hem!' said Squeers, as