Latin Grammar when I was out, every day, with old Glubb. I wish you’d tell old Glubb to come and see me, if you please."
"What a dreadfully low name!" said Mrs Blimber. "Unclassical to a degree! Who is the monster, child?"
"What monster?" inquired Paul.
"Glubb," said Mrs Blimber, with a great disrelish.
"He’s no more a monster than you are," returned Paul.
"What!" cried the Doctor, in a terrible voice. "Aye, aye, aye? Aha! What’s that?"
Paul was dreadfully frightened; but still he made a stand for the absent Glubb, though he did it trembling.
"He’s a very nice old man, Ma’am," he said. "He used to draw my couch. He knows all about the deep sea, and the fish that are in it, and the great monsters that come and lie on rocks in the sun, and dive into the water again when they ’re startled, blowing and splashing so, that they can be heard for miles. There are some creatures," said Paul, warming with his subject, "I don’t know how many yards long, and I forget their names, but Florence knows, that pretend to be in distress; and when a man goes near them, out of compassion, they open their great jaws, and attack him. But all he has got to do," said Paul, boldly tendering this information to the very Doctor himself, "is to keep on turning as he runs away, and then, as they turn slowly, because they are so long, and can’t bend, he’s sure to beat them. And though old Glubb don’t know why the sea should make me think of my Mamma that’s dead, or what it is that it is always saying—always saying!—he knows a great deal about it. And I wish," the child concluded, with a sudden falling of his countenance, and failing in his animation, as he looked like one forlorn, upon the three strange faces, "that you’d let old Glubb come here to see me, for I know him very well, and he knows me."
"Ha!" said the Doctor, shaking his head; "this is bad, but study will do much."
Mrs Blimber opined, with something like a shiver, that he was an unaccountable child; and, allowing for the difference of visage, looked at him pretty much as Mrs. Pipchin had been used to do.
"Take him round the house, Cornelia," said the Doctor, "and familiarise him with his new sphere. Go with that young lady, Dombey."
Dombey obeyed; giving his hand to the abstruse Cornelia, and looking at her sideways, with timid curiosity, as they went away together. For her spectacles, by reason of the glistening of the glasses, made her so mysterious, that he didn’t know where she was looking, and was not indeed quite sure that she had any eyes at all behind them.
Cornelia took him first to the schoolroom, which was situated at the back of the hall, and was approached through two baize doors, which deadened and muffled the young gentlemen’s voices. Here, there were eight young gentlemen in various stages of mental prostration, all very hard at work, and very grave indeed. Toots, as an old hand, had a desk to himself in one corner: and a magnificent man, of immense age, he looked, in Paul’s young eyes, behind it.
Mr Feeder, B.A., who sat at another little desk, had his Virgil stop on, and was slowly grinding that tune to four young gentlemen. Of the remaining four, two, who grasped their foreheads convulsively, were
