One of the darkest things begins to grow in the Pirie Bingle household. Suspicion.

Charles Dickens. Today on the Classic Tales podcast.

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a lifetime pass. And now, A Cricket on the Harth, Part 2 of 3, by Charles Dickens.

Chapter 2, Chirp the Second

Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter lived all alone by themselves, as the storybooks say.

And my blessing, with yours to back it, I hope, on the storybooks, for saying anything in this

work-a-day world. Caleb Plummer and his blind daughter lived all alone by themselves,

in a little cracked nutshell of a wooden house, which was in truth no better than a pimple on the

prominent red-brick nose of gruff and Tackleton.

The premises of gruff and Tackleton were the great feature of the street,

but you might have knocked down Caleb Plummer's dwelling with a hammer or two,

and carried off the pieces in a cart.

If anyone had done the dwelling-house of Caleb Plummer the honour to miss it after such an inroad,

it would have been no doubt to commend its demolition as a vast improvement.

It stuck to the premises of Gruff and Tackleton like a barnacle to a ship's keel,

or a snail to a door, or a little bunch of toadstools to the

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