his father fled to Nicholas, and implored him, in most moving terms, never to give him up, but to let him live and die beside him.
"If you are this boy's father," said Nicholas, "look at the wreck he is, and tell me that you purpose to send him back to that loathsome den from which I brought him."
"Scandal again!" cried Squeers. "Recollect, you an't worth powder and shot, but I'll be even with you one way or another."
"Stop," interposed Ralph, as Snawley was about to speak. "Let us cut this matter short, and not bandy words here with hare-brained profligates. This is your son, as you can prove—and you, Mr. Squeers, you know this boy to be the same that was with you for so many years under the name of Smike—Do you?"
"Do I!" returned Squeers. "Don't I?"
"Good," said Ralph; "a very few words will be sufficient here. You had a son by your first wife, Mr. Snawley?"
"I had," replied that person, "and there he stands."
"We'll show that presently," said Ralph. "You and your wife were separated, and she had the boy to live with her, when he was a year old. You received a communication from her, when you had lived apart a year or two, that the boy was dead; and you believed it?"
"Of course I did!" returned Snawley. "Oh the joy of——"
"Be rational, sir, pray," said Ralph. "This is business, and transports interfere with it. This wife died a year and a half ago, or thereabouts—not more—in some obscure place, where she was house-keeper in a family. Is that the case ?"
"That's the case," replied Snawley.
"Having written on her death-bed a letter or confession to you, about this very boy, which, as it was not directed otherwise than in your name, only reached you, and that by a circuitous course, a few days since?"
"Just so," said Snawley. "Correct in every particular, sir."
"And this confession," resumed Ralph, "is to the effect that his death was an invention of hers to wound you—was a part of a system of annoyance, in short, which you seem to have adopted towards each other—that the boy lived, but was of weak and imperfect intellect—that she sent him by a trusty hand to a cheap school in Yorkshire—that she had paid for his education for some years, and then, being poor, and going a long way off, gradually deserted him, for which she prayed forgiveness?"
Snawley nodded his head, and wiped his eyes; the first slightly, the last violently.
"The school was Mr. Squeers's," continued Ralph; "the boy was left there in the name of Smike; every description was fully given, dates tally exactly with Mr. Squeers's books, Mr. Squeers is lodging with you at this time; you have two other boys at his school: you communicated the whole discovery to him, he brought you to me as the person who had recommended to him the kidnapper of his child; and I brought you here. Is that so?"
