"There's not much to choose between your two states," says the visitor, in a key too low for the old man's dull hearing, as he looks from him to the old woman and back again. "I say!" in a louder voice. "I hear you." "You'll sell me up at last I suppose, when I am a day in arrear." "My dear friend!" cries Grandfather Smallweed, stretching out both hands to embrace him. "Never! Never, my dear friend! But my friend in the city that I got to lend you the money--_he_ might!" "O! you can't answer for him?" says Mr. George; finishing the inquiry, in his lower key, with the words "you lying old rascal!" "My dear friend, he is not to be depended on. I wouldn't trust him. He will have his bond, my dear friend." "Devil doubt him," says Mr. George. Charley appearing with a tray, on which are the pipe, a small paper of tobacco, and the brandy and water, he asked her, "How do you come here! you haven't got the family face." "I goes out to work, sir," returns Charley. The trooper (if trooper he be or have been) takes her bonnet off, with a light touch for so strong a hand, and pats her on the head. "You give the house almost a wholesome look. It wants a bit of youth as much as it wants fresh air." Then he dismisses her, lights his pipe, and drinks to Mr. Smallweed's friend in the city--the one solitary flight of that esteemed old gentleman's imagination. "So you think he might be hard upon me, eh?" "I think he might--I am afraid he would. I have known him do it," says Grandfather Smallweed, incautiously, "twenty times." Incautiously, because his stricken better-half, who has been dozing over the fire for some time, is instantly aroused and jabbers. "Twenty thousand pounds, twenty twenty-pound notes in a money-box, twenty guineas, twenty million twenty per cent., twenty--" and is then cut short by the flying cushion, which the visitor, to whom this singular experiment appears to be a novelty, snatches from her face, as it crushes her in the usual manner. "You're a brimstone idiot. You're a scorpion--a brimstone scorpion! You're a sweltering toad. You're a chattering, clattering, broom-stick witch, that ought to be burnt!" gasps the old man, prostrate in his chair. "My dear friend, will you shake me up a little?" Mr. George, who has been looking first at one of them and then at the other, as if he were demented, takes his venerable acquaintance by the throat on receiving this request, and dragging him upright in his chair as easily as if he were a doll, appears in two minds whether or no to shake all future power of cushioning out of him, and shake him into his grave. Resisting the temptation, but agitating him violently enough to make his head roll like a harlequin's, he puts him smartly down in his chair again, and adjusts his skull cap with such a rub, that the old man winks with both eyes for a minute afterward.