Page:Romance & Reality 1.pdf/132

126 The muffin-boy announced three o'clock—the pot-boy clanking his empty pewter was symptomatic of four—the bellman tolling the knell of the post announced five—and, at length, a heavy hard-hearted rap proclaimed the return of Mr. Smithson; a gruff voice was heard in the passage—a ponderous step on the stairs—the door and his boots creaked, and in came the author of the treatise on bats and beetles, followed by a blue-coated, nankeen-trousered young man, whose countenance and curls united that happy mixture of carmine and charcoal which constitute the Apollo of a Compton Street counter. Mr. Smithson was equally sullen and solemn-looking, with a mouth made only to swear, and a brow to scowl—a tyrant in a small way—one who would be arbitrary about a hash, and obstinate respecting an oyster—one of those tempers which, like a domestic east wind, "spares neither man nor beast," from the unhappy footman that he cursed, to the unlucky dog that he kicked.

A minute specimen of humanity, in a livery like a jealous lover's, of "green and yellow melancholy," announced dinner. Mr. Smithson stalked up to Emily, Mr. Perkins simpered