the level earth. The root is broad and deep, and in the
course of years its fibres have spread out and gathered nourishment from
everything around it. The tree is struck, but not down.

Though he hide the world within him from the world without--which
he believes has but one purpose for the time, and that, to watch him
eagerly wherever he goes--he cannot hide those rebel traces of it,
which escape in hollow eyes and cheeks, a haggard forehead, and a moody,
brooding air. Impenetrable as before, he is still an altered man; and,
proud as ever, he is humbled, or those marks would not be there.

The world. What the world thinks of him, how it looks at him, what it
sees in him, and what it says--this is the haunting demon of his mind.
It is everywhere where he is; and, worse than that, it is everywhere
where he is not. It comes out with him among his servants, and yet
he leaves it whispering behind; he sees it pointing after him in the
street; it is waiting for him in his counting-house; it leers over
the shoulders of rich men among the merchants; it goes beckoning and
babbling among the crowd; it always anticipates him, in every place; and
is always busiest, he knows, when he has gone away. When he is shut
up in his room at night, it is in his house, outside it, audible in
footsteps on the pavement, visible in print upon the table, steaming to
and fro on railroads and in ships; restless and busy everywhere, with
nothing else but him.

It is not a phantom of his imagination. It is as active in other
people's minds as in his. Witness Cousin Feenix, who comes from
Baden-Baden, purposely to talk to him. Witness Major Bagstock, who
accompanies Cousin Feenix on that friendly mission.

Mr Dombey receives them with his usual dignity, and stands erect, in his
old attitude, before the fire. He feels that the world is looking at
him out of their eyes. That it is in the stare of the pictures. That Mr
Pitt, upon the bookcase, represents it. That there are eyes in its own
map, hanging on the wall.

'An unusually cold spring,' says Mr Dombey--to deceive the world.

'Damme, Sir,' says the Major, in the warmth of friendship, 'Joseph
Bagstock is a bad hand at a counterfeit. If you want to hold your
friends off, Dombey, and to give them the cold shoulder, J. B. is not
the man for your purpose. Joe is rough and tough, Sir; blunt, Sir,
blunt, is Joe. His Royal Highness the late Duke of York did me the
honour to say, deservedly or undeserv