Page:Cuthbert Bede--Little Mr Bouncer and Tales of College Life.djvu/196

176 do. For it very quickly was made evident that, although Mr. Quickfall was slow in action, yet he was quick in speech, and was a most communicative person. He had no sooner got Mr. Bouncer well tucked up into a parcel, and had brushed his hair all over his eyes, than he solemnly paused at the very initiation of his work to commence a highly uninteresting narrative concerning the election of a new member of the Town Council. It appeared, from the statements to which Mr. Bouncer, in his helpless and packed-up state, was compelled to listen, that Mr. Quickfall was a member of that august body, and that the present contest was tearing Barham to pieces, and wounding it in its very tenderest points; and that, if the obnoxious person—whose name was Tarver—should succeed in his election, the doom of Barham was virtually settled, and its position in the eyes of Europe irretrievably compromised. But Mr. Quickfall entertained the hope that he himself might be the humble instrument of opening the eyes of Barham to a proper sense of its true position, and of ridding the Town Council of the dreadful incubus of a Tarver.

While he uttered these patriotic sentiments, Mr. Quickfall was far too engrossed with his subject to continue his hair-dressing duties; and, with comb and scissors in his outstretched hands, he stood in front of his customer, as though time were no object with him, and that the business of hair-cutting could be continued at convenient intervals during the progress of his address. Little Mr. Bouncer, who was utterly indifferent not only to the success of Tarver, but to the doom of Barham, thought of Crowquill's sketch of the talkative parrot of a hairdresser, who says to the bear, upon whose head he is engaged, "Do you think we shall have a war with