CHAPTER XXII.
TOBIAS HAS A MIND DISEASED.
With a bottle of claret upon the table between them, Colonel Jeffery and his old friend sat over the fire in the bed-room devoted to the use of poor Tobias Ragg. Alas! poor boy, kindness and wealth that now surrounded him came late in the day. Before he first crossed the threshold of Sweeney Todd’s odious abode, what human heart could have more acutely felt genuine kindness than Tobias’s, but his destiny had been an evil one. Guilt has its victims, and Tobias was in all senses one of the victims of Sweeney Todd.
“I am sufficiently, perhaps superstitious, you will call it,” said Colonel Jeffery in a low tone of voice, “to think that my meeting with this boy was not altogether accidental.”
“Indeed?”
“No. Many things have happened to me during li
