Page:The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club.djvu/643

Rh The young lady was not at all softened by these allurements, for she at once expressed her opinion that Mr. Bob Sawyer Avas an " odous creetur ; ' and, on his becoming rather more pressing in his attentions, imprinted her fair fingers upon his face, and bounced out of the room with many expressions of aversion and contempt.

Deprived of the young lady's society, irr. Bob Sawyer proceeded to divert himself by peeping into the desk, looking into all the table- drawers, feigning to pick the lock of the iron safe, turning the almanack with its face to the wall, trying Mr. Winkle senior's boots on, over his own, and making several other humorous experiments upon the furniture, all of which afforded Mr. Pickwick unspeakable horror and agony, and yielded Mr. Bob Sawyer proportionate delight.

At length the door opened, and a little old gentleman in a snuff- coloured suit, with a head and face the precise counterpart of those belonging to Mr. Winkle junior, excepting that he was rather bald, trotted into the room with Mr. Pickwick's card in one hand, and a silver candlestick in the other.

"Mr. Pickwick, Sir, how do you do?" said Winkle the elder, putting down the candlestick and proffering his hand. "Hope I see you well, Sir. Glad to see you. Be seated, Mr. Pickwick, I beg Sir. This gentleman is — "

"My friend Mr. Sawyer," interposed Mr. Pickwick, "your son's friend."

"Oh," said Mr. Winkle the elder, looking rather grimly at Bob. "I hope you are well. Sir."

"Right as a trivet," replied Bob Sawyer.

"This other gentleman," cried Mr. Pickwick, "is, as you will see when you have read the letter with which I am entrusted, a very near relative, or I should rather say a very particular friend of your son's. His name is Allen."

"That gentleman?" enquired Mr. Winkle, pointing with the card towards Ben Allen, who had fallen asleep in an attitude which left nothing of him visible but his spine and his coat collar.

Mr. Pickwick was on the point of replying to the question, and reciting Mr. Benjamin Allen's name and honourable distinctions at full length, when the sprightly Mr. Bob Sawyer, with the view of rousing his friend to a sense of his situation, inflicted a startling pinch upon the fleshy part of his arm, which caused him to jump up with a loud shriek. Suddenly aware that he was in the presence of a stranger, Mr. Ben Allen advanced and, shaking Mr. Winkle most affectionately by both hands for about five minutes, murmured in some half-intelligible fragments of sentences the great delight he felt in seeing him, and a hospitable enquiry, whether he felt disposed to take anything after his walk, or would prefer waiting "till dinner-time ;" which done, he sat down and gazed about him with a petrified stare as if he had not the remotest idea where he was, which indeed he Lad not.

All this was most embarrassing to Mr. Pickwick, the more especially as Mr. Winkle, senior, evinced palpable astonishment at the eccentric—not to say extraordinary—behaviour of his two companions. To