Mrs. Boffin and me, ma'am, are plain people, and we don't want to pretend to anything, nor yet to go round and round at anything because there's always a straight way to everything.

But, tears were not the things to find their way to Mr. Bumble's soul; his heart was waterproof.

In the moonlight which is always sad, as the light of the sun itself is--as the light called human life is--at its coming and its going.

You may be an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. There's more of gravy than of grave about you, whatever you are!

I ate 'umble pie with an appetite.

I know enough of the world now to have almost lost the capacity of being much surprised by anything

All other swindlers upon earth are nothing to the self-swindlers, and with such pretences did I cheat myself. Surely a curious thing. That I should innocently take a bad half-crown of somebody else's manufacture, is reasonable enough; but that I should knowingly reckon the spurious coin of my own make, as good money!