‘You feel as a mother, Mrs. Mann.’ (He stirred the gin-and-water.) ‘I — I drink your health with cheerfulness, Mrs. Mann’; and he swallowed half of it.

‘And now about business,’ said the beadle, taking out a leathern pocket-book. ‘The child that was half-baptized Oliver Twist, is nine year old to-day.’

‘Bless him!’ interposed Mrs. Mann, inflaming her left eye with the corner of her apron.

‘And notwithstanding a offered reward of ten pound, which was afterwards increased to twenty pound. Notwithstanding the most superlative, and, I may say, supernat’ral exertions on the part of this parish,’ said Bumble, ‘we have never been able to discover who is his father, or what was his mother’s