The coachman mounted his box and drove slowly off, leaving the two bricklayers, and an old apple-woman, and a town-made little boy returning from an evening school, who had been the only witnesses of the scene, to meditate upon it at their leisure.
Mr Squeers sat himself down on the opposite seat to the unfortunate Smike, and, planting his hands firmly on his knees, looked at him for some five minutes, when, seeming to recover from his trance, he uttered a loud laugh, and slapped his old pupil's face several times--taking the right and left sides alternately.
'It isn't a dream!' said Squeers.

'That's real flesh and blood! I know the feel of it!' and being quite assured of his good fortune by these experiments, Mr Squeers administered a few boxes on the ear, lest the entertainments should seem to partake of sameness, and laughed louder and longer at every one.
'Your mother will be fit to jump out of her skin, my boy, when she hears of this,' said Squeers to his son.
'Oh, won't she though, father ?' replied Master Wackford.
'To think,' said Squeers, 'that you and me should be turning out of a street, and come upon him at the very nick; and that I should have him tight, at only one cast of the umbrella, as if I had hooked him with a grappling-iron! Ha, ha!' 'Didn't I catch hold of his leg, neither, father ?' said little Wackford.
'You did; like a good 'un, my boy,' said Mr Squeers, patting his son's head, 'and you shall have the best button-over jacket and waistcoat that the next new boy brings down, as a reward of merit.

Mind that.

You always keep on in the same path, and do them things that you see your father do, and when you die you'll go right slap to Heaven and no questions asked.' Improving the occasion in these words, Mr Squeers patted his son's head again, and then patted Smike's--but harder; and inquired in a bantering tone how he found himself by this time.
'I must go home,' replied Smike, looking wildly round.
'To be sure you must.

You're about right there,' replied Mr Squeers.
'You'll go home very soon, you will.