efore them and
deferentially stopping them again, still cap in hand: 'I wouldn't have
troubled you with such a pint except as a way of gettin' in the name
of my son Biler--christened Robin--him as you was so good as to make a
Charitable Grinder on.'

'Well, man,' said Mr Dombey in his severest manner. 'What about him?'

'Why, Sir,' returned Toodle, shaking his head with a face of great
anxiety and distress, 'I'm forced to say, Sir, that he's gone wrong.

'He has gone wrong, has he?' said Mr Dombey, with a hard kind of
satisfaction.

'He has fell into bad company, you see, genelmen,' pursued the father,
looking wistfully at both, and evidently taking the Major into the
conversation with the hope of having his sympathy. 'He has got into bad
ways. God send he may come to again, genelmen, but he's on the wrong
track now! You could hardly be off hearing of it somehow, Sir,' said
Toodle, again addressing Mr Dombey individually; 'and it's better I
should out and say my boy's gone rather wrong. Polly's dreadful down
about it, genelmen,' said Toodle with the same dejected look, and
another appeal to the Major.

'A son of this man's whom I caused to be educated, Major,' said Mr
Dombey, giving him his arm. 'The usual return!'

'Take advice from plain old Joe, and never educate that sort of people,
Sir,' returned the Major. 'Damme, Sir, it never does! It always fails!'

The simple father was beginning to submit that he hoped his son, the
quondam Grinder, huffed and cuffed, and flogged and badged, and taught,
as parrots are, by a brute jobbed into his place of schoolmaster with as
much fitness for it as a hound, might not have been educated on quite
a right plan in some undiscovered respect, when Mr Dombey angrily
repeating 'The usual return!' led the Major away. And the Major being
heavy to hoist into Mr Dombey's carriage, elevated in mid-air, and
having to stop and swear that he would flay the Native alive, and break
every bone in his skin, and visit other physical torments upon him,
every time he couldn't get his foot on the step, and fell back on that
dark exile, had barely time before they started to repeat hoarsely that
it would never do: that it always failed: and that if he were to educate
'his own vagabond,' he would certainly be hanged.

Mr Dombey assented bitterly; but there was something more in his
bitterness, and in his moody way of falling back in the carriage, and
looking with knitted brows at the changing o