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OLIVER TWIST;

OR, THE PARISH BOY'S PROGress.

BY BOZ.

ILLUSTRATED BY GEORGE CRUIKSHANK.

BOOK THE SECOND.

CHAPTER THE FOURTH,

IN WHICH A MYSTERIOUS CHARACTER APPEARS UPON THE SCENE, AND MANY THINGS INSEPARABLE FROM THIS HISTORY ARE DONE AND PERFORMED.

THE old man had gained the street corner before he began to recover the effect of Toby Crackit's intelligence. He had relaxed nothing of his unusual speed, but was still pressing onward in the same wild and disordered manner, when the sudden dashing past of a carriage, and a boisterous cry from the foot-passengers who saw his danger, drove him back upon the pavement. Looking hastily round, as if uncertain whither he had been hurrying, he paused for a few mo. ments, and turned away in quite an opposite direction to that in which he had before proceeded. Avoiding as much as possible all the main streets, and skulking only through the by-ways and alleys, he at length emerged on Snow Hill. Here he walked even faster than before; nor did he linger until he had again turned into a court, when, as if conscious that he was now in his proper element, he fell into his usual shuffling pace, and seemed to breathe more freely.

Near to the spot on which Snow Hill and Holborn Hill meet, there opens, upon the right hand as you come out of the city, a narrow and dismal alley leading to Saffron Hill. In its filthy shops are exposed for sale huge bunches of second-hand silk-handkerchiefs of all sizes and patterns, for here reside the traders who purchase them from pickpockets. Hundreds of these handkerchiefs hang dangling from pegs outside the windows, or flaunting from the door-posts; and the shelves within are piled with them. Confined as the limits of Field Lane are, it has its barber, its coffee-shop, its beer-shop, and its friedfish warehouse. It is a commercial colony of itself, the emporium of petty larceny, visited at early morning and setting-in of dusk by silent merchants, who traffic in dark back-parlors, and go as strangely as they came. Here the clothesman, the shoe-vamper, and the ragmerchant display their goods as sign-boards to the petty thief; and stores of old iron and bones, and heaps of mildewy fragments of woollen-stuff and linen, rust and rot in the grimy cellars.

It was into this place that the Jew turned. He was well-known the sallow denizens of the lane, for such of them as were on the look.

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