Page:Cuthbert Bede--Little Mr Bouncer and Tales of College Life.djvu/279

Rh most unromantic and offensive way, he suggests that shrimps and prawns form an excellent appendage to a well-regulated breakfast-table; and further hints that he—he, the disturber of my solitude, and soliloquy—by name, Tom Barr, but familiarly known as Old Barnacles, will feel it a honour to wait upon a party as smokes such good tobaccer. Of course, I give him a cigar, and an order for the family breakfast; by which time, as my weed is nearly out, and my chain of ideas has been rudely snapt, I return, in a ghostlike, dreamy way, back to the hotel.

"To-morrow," I thought, "I shall see her!" and, comforted by this pleasing thought, I turned off to bed.

 

to have dreamed of her, and should probably have done so, had not the low murmur of the waves lulled me into too sound a sleep for a visit to Dream land; but I devoted my thoughts to her during the whole time I was shaving, and, as that included the risk of a razor-cut, I began to think that I was decidedly, and madly, in love.

After breakfast, I descended into the precincts of the Bar, in order to have a gossip with our landlady. Mrs. Rummell was always particularly obliging on this point; and I therefore experienced no difficulty in leading the conversation on to the subject of yesterday's arrival. 