第41章(1 / 3)

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 overl