How many of them since I was a little child, younger than any that are here now! Where are they all!"
"Whom do you speak of?" inquired Nicholas, wishing to rouse the poor half-witted creature to reason. "Tell me."
"My friends," he replied, "myself—my—oh! what sufferings mine have been!"
"There is always hope," said Nicholas; he knew not what to say.
"No," rejoined the other, "no; none for me. Do you remember the boy that died here?"
"I was not here you know," said Nicholas gently; "but what of him?"
"Why," replied the youth, drawing closer to his questioner's side, "I was with him at night, and when it was all silent he cried no more for friends he wished to come and sit with him, but began to see faces round his bed that came from home; he said they smiled, and talked to him, and died at last lifting his head to kiss them. Do you hear?"
"Yes, yes," rejoined Nicholas.
"What faces will smile on me when I die!" said his companion, shivering. "Who will talk to me in those long nights? They cannot come from home; they would frighten me if they did, for I don't know what it is, and shouldn't know them. Pain and fear, pain and fear for me, alive or dead. No hope, no hope."
The bell rang to bed, and the boy subsiding at the sound into his usual listless state, crept away as if anxious to avoid notice. It was with a heavy heart that Nicholas soon afterwards—no, not retired; there was no retirement there—followed—to his dirty and crowded dormitory.
CHAPTER IX.
OF MISS SQUEERS, MRS. SQUEERS, MASTER SQUEERS, AND MR. SQUEERS; AND VARIOUS MATTERS AND PERSONS CONNECTED NO LESS WITH THE SQUEERSES THAN WITH NICHOLAS NICKLEBY.
When Mr. Squeers left the school-room for the night, he betook himself, as has been before remarked, to his own fire-side, which was situated—not in the room in which Nicholas had supped on the night of his arrival, but in a smaller apartment in the rear of the premises, where his lady wife, his amiable son, and accomplished daughter, were in the full enjoyment of each other's society: Mrs. Squeers being engaged in the matronly pursuit of stocking-darning, and the young lady and gentleman occupied in the adjustment of some youthful differences by means of a pugilistic contest across the table, which, on the approach of their honoured parent, subsided into a noiseless exchange of kicks beneath it.
And in this place it may be as well to apprise the reader, that Miss Fanny Squeers was in her three-and-twentieth year. If there be any
