Page 990 - bleak-house

CHAPTER XLIX

Dutiful Friendship

A great annual occasion has come round in the estab-
lishment of Mr. Matthew Bagnet, otherwise Lignum Vitae,
ex-artilleryman and present bassoon-player. An occasion of
feasting and festival. The celebration of a birthday in the
family.
It is not Mr. Bagnet’s birthday. Mr. Bagnet merely distin-
guishes that epoch in the musical instrument business by
kissing the children with an extra smack before breakfast,
smoking an additional pipe after dinner, and wondering to-
wards evening what his poor old mother is thinking about
it—a subject of infinite speculation, and rendered so by his
mother having departed this life twenty years. Some men
rarely revert to their father, but seem, in the bank-books of
their remembrance, to have transferred all the stock of filial
affection into their mother’s name. Mr. Bagnet is one of like
his trade the better for that. If I had kept clear of his old girl
causes him usually to make the nounsubstantive ‘goodness’
of the feminine gender.
It is not the birthday of one of the three children. Those
occasions are kept with some marks of distinction, but they

990 Bleak House