Page:Dickens - Our Mutual Friend, ed. Lang, 1897, vol.1.djvu/53

 "Quite right."

"This is him as had a nasty cut over the eye. This is them two young sisters what tied themselves together with a handkecher. This is the drunken old chap, in a pair of list slippers and a nightcap, wot had offered it afterwards come out to make a hole in the water for a quartern of rum, stood aforehand, and kept to his word for the first and last time in his life. They pretty well papers the room, you see; but I know "em all. I'm scholar enough! "

He waved the light over the whole, as if to typify the light of his scholarly intelligence, and then put it down on the table and stood behind it looking intently at his visitors. He had the special peculiarity of some birds of prey, that when he knitted his brow, his ruffled crest stood highest.

"You did not find all these yourself; did you?"" asked Eugene.

To which the bird of prey slowly rejoined, " And what might your name be, now? "

"This is my friend," Mortimer Lightwood interposed; "Mr. Eugene Wrayburn."

" Mr. Eugene Wrayburn, is it? And what might Mr. Eugene Wrayburn have asked of me? "

" I asked you, simply, if you found all these yourself? "

" I answer you, simply, most on 'em."

"Do you suppose there has been much violence and robbery, beforehand, among these cases? "

" I don't suppose at all about it," returned Gaffer. "I ain't one of the supposing sort. If you'd got your living to hand out of the river every day of your life, you mightn't be much given to supposing. Am I to show the way? "

As he opened the door, in pursuance of a nod from Lightwood, an extremely pale and disturbed face appeared in the doorway—the face of a man much agitated.

" A body missing?" asked Gaffer Hexam, stopping short; or a body found? Which? "