Mr. and Mrs. Dibble had returned together to London, to their little lodging-house at Pimlico, but by no means to live a happy life; for Dibble had been persuaded to lend the showman fifty pounds the morning after that introduction at Severntown, and the money had been lost irretrievably; for within a fortnight afterwards Digby Martin had presented himself at their house a ruined, ragged, dissipated fellow. His daughter had eloped with some vagabond, and left him; business had waned from that moment until it dwindled away almost to nothing. The skeleton had declined to enter into the proposed contract, and his “traps” had been sold to pay the rent of the ground at the “Blue Posts.” He had walked all the way to London, friendless and a beggar, his only means of subsistence being in the money earned by Momus. The dawg, he said, had behaved like a Christian to him, and he was sure his friend Dibble would do no less, considering how Dibble had been treated in the palmy days of the Temple. This was all very well, and Mrs. Dibble would perhaps not have complained had the showman taken his departure after the first visit, and not presented himself for renewed charity; but he came again and again, and Mrs. Dibble and her husband had serious disagreements about it. The lodgers were scandalised at the visits of this low person and his dawg, and one of them had given up his rooms at a day’s notice because he had seen this friend of Dibble’s going through a performance with his dog, and begging coppers, in a back street. Dibble had appealed to the showman to leave the neighbourhood, and had bribed him too. But Digby Martin, _alias_ Digger, _alias_ Smith, knew a trick worth two of that. He only spent the bribe in drink, and came back to Still Street and abused Mrs. Dibble for being proud and stuck up. To think that she should come to this, with her boarding-school education and her semi-architectural contracting father; it was a blow which Mrs. Dibble could not possibly have dreamed of, and she upbraided herself for her weakness in following Dibble and releasing him from his degraded position. “He never asked you, marm,” said the showman, with a drunken leer. “It wash not our wish you should come and sheek ush out--you old catamaran!” “Catamaran!” exclaimed Mrs. Dibble, dashing the tears from her eyes. “Catamaran!--Dibble, if you don’t punch that breuth head I will--so there!” “Then I must do it, I suppose,” said Dibble. “Now, look’e ’ere, friend,” said Dibble; “I baint goin’ to stand any more o’ this; so clear out.” “Dy’e hear that, Momush?” said the showman; “we’re to clear out,” and thereupon the drunken magician prepared for the coming engagement.