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 law, I should like to know? It’s a poor tale, with all the law as there is up and down, if it's no use proving whose child you are. Fletcher may say that if he likes, but I say, don’t Fletcher me!”

Mr Dill affected to laugh in a complimentary way at Mrs Dollop, as a woman who was more than a match for the lawyers; being disposed to submit to much twitting from a landlady who had a long score against him.

“If they come to lawing, and it’s all true as folks say, there’s more to be looked to nor money,” said the glazier. “There's this poor creetur as is dead and gone: by what I can make out, he’d seen the day when he was a deal finer gentleman nor Bulstrode.”

“Finer gentleman! I’ll warrant him,” said Mrs Dollop; “and a far personabler man, by what I can hear. As I said when Mr Baldwin, the tax-gatherer, comes in, a-standing where you sit, and says, ‘Bulstrode got all his money as he brought into this town by thieving and swindling,’—I said, ‘You don’t make me no wiser, Mr Baldwin: it’s set my blood a-creeping to look at him ever sin’ here he came into Slaughter Lane a-wanting to buy the house over my head: folks don’t look the colour o’ the dough-tub and stare at you as if they wanted to see into your backbone for nothingk.’ That was what I said, and Mr Baldwin can bear me witness.”

“And in the rights of it too,” said Mr Crabbe. “For by what I can make out, this Raffles, as they call him, was a lusty, fresh-coloured man as you'd wish to see, and the best o’ company—though dead he lies in Lowick churchyard sure enough; and by what I can understan’, there’s them knows more than they should know about how he got there.”

“I’ll believe you!” said Mrs Dollop, with a touch of scorn at Mr Crabbe’s apparent dimness. “When a man’s been ’ticed to a lone house, and there’s them can pay for hospitals and nurses for half the country-side choose to be sitters-up night and day, and nobody to come near but a doctor as is known to stick at nothingk, and as poor as he can hang together, and after that so flush o’ money as he can pay off Mr Byles the butcher as his bill has been running on for the best o’ joints since last Michaelmas was a twelvemonth—I don’t want anybody to come and tell me as there’s been more going on nor the Prayer-book’s got a service for—I don’t want to stand winking and blinking and thinking.”

Mrs Dollop looked round with the air of a landlady accustomed to dominate her company. There was a chorus of adhesion from the more courageous; but Mr Limp, after taking a draught, placed his flat hands together and pressed them hard between his knees, looking down at them with blear-eyed contemplation, as if the scorching power of Mrs Dollop’s speech had quite dried up and nullified his wits until they could be brought round again by further moisture.

“Why shouldn’t they dig the man up and have the Crowner?” said the dyer. “It's been done many and many’s the time. If there's been foul play they might find it out.”