Charity Pecksniff succeeded in ensnaring her young man at last. The day they were to be married, however, he did not come to the church, but ran off to Van Diemen's Land, and she lived and died a vinegary, shrewish old maid. As for Pecksniff himself, having lost all his money in the Anglo-Bengalee Company (which, of course, went to pieces on Tigg's death), he sank lower and lower, till at last, a drunken, squalid old man, he eked out a miserable existence writing whining begging letters to the very people whom he had once labored so hard to make unhappy. OUR MUTUAL FRIEND Published 1864-1865 _Scene_: London and Neighboring Towns _Time_: 1860 CHARACTERS Mr. Harmon A rich dust collector Mr. Boffin Foreman of the dust business and heir to the Harmon fortune Known as "The Golden Dustman" Mrs. Boffin His wife John Harmon Mr. Harmon's son Later Mr. Boffin's secretary, under the name of "John Rokesmith" Mr. Veneering A rich man with social and political ambitions Mr. Wilfer A clerk in Mr. Veneering's office Bella His daughter Silas Wegg A one-legged ballad seller "Rogue" Riderhood A riverman of bad reputation Later a lock tender Hexam A riverman Charley His son Lizzie His daughter "Jenny Wren" A crippled friend of Lizzie's, known as "The Dolls' Dressmaker" Eugene Wrayburn A reckless young lawyer Headstone A schoolmaster Mr. Venus A dismal young man with a dismal trade--the stringing together of human skeletons on wires OUR MUTUAL FRIEND I WHAT HAPPENED TO JOHN HARMON In London there once lived an old man named Harmon who had made a great fortune by gathering the dust and ashes of the city and sorting it for whatever it contained of value. He lived in a house surrounded by great mounds of dust that he had collected. He was a hard-hearted man and when his daughter would not marry as he wished he turned her out of the house on a winter's night. The poor girl died soon after, and her younger brother (a boy of only fourteen), indignant at his father's cruelty, ran away to a foreign country, where for years he was not heard of. The old man, hard-hearted as he was, and though he never spoke of the son save with anger and curses, felt this keenly, for in his own way he had loved the boy.