Page:The London Magazine, volume 7 (January–June 1823).djvu/516

 the student upon his happy deliverance; and, finding that he was a countryman of her own, she invited him to a ball which she gave on the evening of that day, in honour of the King’s birth-day.

Now it must be acknowledged that a ball-room was not exactly the stage on which Mr. Schnackenberger’s habits of life had qualified him for shining: however, the pleasure of a nearer acquaintance with the interesting princessheld out too flattering a prospect to allow of his declining her invitation. Just at this moment Juno returned.

Meantime the fire (occasioned probably by a spark falling from the landlady’s lamp amongst the straw under the staircase) had been extinguished: and Mrs. Sweetbread, who had at length been roused at the back, now made her appearance; and with many expressions of regret for what had happened to Mr. Schnackenberger, who had entirely re-established himself in her esteem by his gold-laden purse, and also by what she called his “very handsome behaviour” to the horse-dealer, she requested that he would be pleased to step into one of her back rooms; at the same time, offering to reinstate his clothes in wearable condition by drying them as rapidly as possible: a necessity which was too clamorously urgent for immediate attention—to allow of the dripping student’s rejecting her offer.

As Mr. Jeremiah stood looking out of the window for the purpose of whiling away a tedious forenoon, it first struck his mind—upon the sight of a number of men dressed very differently from himself—that his wardrobe would scarcely match with the festal splendour of the fête at which he was to be present in the evening. Even if it had been possible to overlook the tarnished lustre of his coat, not much embellished by its late watery trials upon the golden sow, yet he could not possibly make his appearance in a surtout. He sent therefore to one tailor after another: but all assured him that they had their hands much too full of business to undertake the conversion of his surtout into a dress coat against the evening; still less could they undertake to make a new one. Just as vainly did he look about for shoes: many were on sale; but none of them with premises spacious enough to accommodate his very respectable feet.

All this put him into no little perplexity. True it was, that Mrs. Sweetbread had spontaneously thrown open to his inspection the wardrobe of her deceased husband. But even he had contrived to go through this world in shoes of considerably smaller dimensions than Mr. Jeremiah demanded. And from a pretty large choice of coats there was not one which he could turn to account. For, to say nothing of their being one and all too short by a good half ell, even in the very best of them he looked precisely as that man looks who has lately slaughtered a hog, or as that man looks who designs to slaughter a hog.

Now, then, when all his plans for meeting the exigencies of his case had turned out abortive, suddenly a bold idea struck him. In a sort of inspiration he seized a pair of scissors, for the purpose of converting with his own untutored hand of genius his pea-green surtout into a pea-green frock. This operation having, in his own judgment, succeeded to a marvel, he no longer hesitated to cut out a pair of ball shoes from his neat’s-leather “field-pieces.” Whatever equipments were still wanting could be had for money, with the exception of a shirt; and, as to that, the wedding shirt of the late Mr. Sweetbread would answer the purpose very passably.

What provoked our hero most of all were the new patent shoe-buckles, the fine points of which would not take firm hold of the coarse leather shoes, but on every bold step burst asunder—so that he was obliged to keep his eye warily upon them, and in consideration of their tender condition, to set his feet down to the ground very gently.

The hostess had just sunk pretty deep into her customary failing of intoxication, when he went to her and asked how he looked in his gala