"_Is_ there?--how do you know?" "Lucy Maria Rumbles, please, sir, she told me, and he's _very bad_." The fashion of Levi's countenance was changed as he turned from her suddenly, and knocked so sharply at the door that the canary, hanging from the window in his cage over the way, arrested his song, and was agitated for an hour afterwards. So Mr. Levi was now thoroughly aroused to the danger that had so suddenly overcast his hopes, and threatened to swallow in the bottomless sea of death the golden stake he had ventured. It was not, nevertheless, until eight o'clock in the evening, so hard a thing is it to collect three given men [what then must be the office of whip to Whig or Tory side of the House?] that the two Jews and Mr. Larkin were actually assembled in Mr. Dingwell's bed-room, now reeking with disinfectants and prophylactic fluids. The party were in sore dismay, for the interesting patient had begun to maunder very preposterously in his talk. They listened, and heard him say-- "That's a lie--I say, I'd nail his tongue to the table. Bells won't ring for it--lots of bells in England; you'll not find 'em _here_, though." And then it went off into a mumbling, and Mr. Goldshed, who was listening disconsolately, exclaimed, "My eyesh!" "Well, how do you like it, guv'nor? I said he'd walk the plank, and so he will," said Levi. "He will--he will;" and Levi clenched his white teeth, with an oath. "_There_, Mr. Levi, _pray_, pray, none of _that_," said Mr. Larkin. The three gentlemen were standing in a row, from afar off observing the patient, with an intense scrutiny of a gloomy and, I may say, a savage kind. "He was an unfortunate agent--no energy, except for his pleasures," resentfully resumed Mr. Larkin, who was standing furthest back of the three speculators. "Indolent, impracticable enough to ruin fifty cases; and now here he lies in a fever, contracted, you think, Mr. Levi, in some of his abominable haunts." Mr. Larkin did not actually say "d---- him," but he directed a very dark, sharp look upon his acquaintance in the bed. "Abawminable, to be sure, abawminable. Bah! It's all true. The hornies has their eye on him these seven weeks past--curse the beasht," snarled Mr. Levi, clenching his fists in his pockets, "and every da--a--m muff that helped to let me in for this here rotten business." "Meaning _me_, sir?" said Mr. Larkin, flushing up to the top of his head a fierce pink. Levi answered nothing, and Mr. Larkin did not press his question. It is very easy to be companionable and good-humoured while all goes pleasantly. It is failure, loss, and disappointment, that try the sociable qualities; even those three amiable men felt less amicable under the cloud than they had under the sunshine. So they all three looked in their several ways angrily and thoughtfully at the gentleman in the typhus fever, who said rather abruptly--