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198 "I shall have the honour of stokin’ of you down, Sir," said Mr. Toodle. "Beg your pardon, Sir.—I hope you find yourself a coming round?"

Mr. Dombey looked at him, in return for his tone of interest, as if a man like that would make his very eyesight dirty.

"’Scuse the liberty, Sir," said Toodle, seeing he was not clearly remembered, "but my wife Polly, as was called Richards in your family—"

A change in Mr. Dombey’s face, which seemed to express recollection of him, and so it did, but it expressed in a much stronger degree an angry sense of humiliation, stopped Mr. Toodle short.

"Your wife wants money, I suppose," said Mr. Dombey, putting his hand in his pocket, and speaking (but that he always did) haughtily.

"No thank’ee, Sir," returned Toodle, "I can’t say she does. I don’t."

Mr. Dombey was stopped short now in his turn: and awkwardly: with his hand in his pocket.

"No, Sir," said Toodle, turning his oilskin cap round and round; "we ’re a doin’ pretty well, Sir; we haven’t no cause to complain in the worldly way, Sir. We ’ve had four more since then, Sir, but we rubs on."

Mr. Dombey would have rubbed on to his own carriage, though in so doing he had rubbed the stoker underneath the wheels; but his attention was arrested by something in connexion with the cap still going slowly round and round in the man’s hand.

"We lost one babby," observed Toodle, "there’s no denyin’."

"Lately," added Mr. Dombey, looking at the cap.

"No, Sir, up’ard of three years ago, but all the rest is hearty. And in the matter o' readin’, Sir," said Toodle, ducking again, as if to remind Mr. Dombey of what had passed between them on that subject long ago, "them boys o’ mine, they learned me, among 'em, arter all. They ’ve made a wery tolerable scholar of me, Sir, them boys."

"Come, Major!" said Mr. Dombey.

"Beg your pardon, Sir," resumed Toodle, taking a step before 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.