whose head was garnished with tenderer spikes, and whose young

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

eyes stood close by one another, as his father’s did, kept the

required watch upon his mother. He greatly disturbed the poor

woman at intervals, by darting out of his sleeping closet, where he

made his toilet, with a suppressed cry of “You are going to flop,

mother.Halloa, father!” and, after raising this fictitious alarm,

darting in again with an undutiful grin.

Mr. Cruncher’s temper was not at all improved when he came

to his breakfast. He resented Mrs. Cruncher’s saying grace with

particular animosity.

“Now, Aggerawayter! What are you up to? At it agin?”

His wife explained that she had merely “asked a blessing.”

“Don’t do it!” said Mr. Cruncher, looking about, as if he rather

expected to see the loaf disappear under the efficacy of his wife’s

petitions. “I ain’t a going to be blest out of house and home. I won’t

have my wittles blest off my table. Keep still!”

Exceedingly red-eyed and grim, as if he had been up all night at

a party which had taken anything but a convivial turn, Jerry

Cruncher worried his breakfast rather than ate it, growling over it

like any four-footed inmate of a menagerie. Towards nine o’clock

he smoothed his ruffled aspect, and, presenting as respectable and

business-like an exterior as he could overlay his natural self with,

issued forth to the occupation of the day.

It could scarcely be called a trade, in spite of his favourite

description of himself as “a honest tradesman.” His stock

consisted of a wooden stool, made out of a broken-backed chair

cut down, which stool, young Jerry, walking at his father’s side,

carried every morning to beneath the banking-house window that

was nearest Temple Bar: where, with the addition of the first

handful of straw that could be gleaned from any passing vehicle to

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

keep the cold and wet from the odd-job-man’s feet, it formed the

encampment for the day. On this post of his, Mr. Cruncher was as

well known to Fleet Street and the Temple, as the Bar itself,and

was almost as ill-looking.

Encamped at a quarter before nine, in good time to touch his

three-cornered hat to the oldest of the men as they passed in to

Tellson’s, Jerry took up his station on this windy March morning,

with young Jerry standing by him, when not engaged in making

forays through the Bar, to inflict bodily and mental injuries of an

acute description on passing boys who were small enough for his

amiable purpose. Father and son, extremely like each other,

looking silently on at the morning traffic in Fleet Street, with their

two heads as near to one another as the two eyes of each were,

bore a considerable resemblance to a pair of monkeys. The

resemblance was not lessened by the accidental circumstance,

that the mature Jerry bit and spat out straw, while the twinkling

eyes of the youthful Jerry were as restlessly watchful of him as of

everything else in Fleet Street. The head of one of the regular