What a hubbub! what roarings, and shoutings, and recognizings! 'Bless my
heart! who'd have thought of seeing you?' and, 'By jingo! what's sent _you_
here?'
'My dear Waffles,' cries Jawleyford, rushing up to our Laverick Wells
friend (who is looking very debauched), 'I'm overjoyed to see you. Do come
upstairs and see Mrs. Jawleyford and the dear girls. It was only last
night we were talking about you.' And so Jawleyford hurries Mr. Waffles
off, just as Waffles is _in extremis_ about his horse.
Looking around the scene there seems to be everybody that we have had the
pleasure of introducing to the reader in the course of Mr. Sponge's Tour.
Mr. and Mrs. Springwheat in their dog-cart, Mrs. Springey's figure looking
as though 'wheat had got above forty, my lord'; old Jog and his handsome
wife in the ugly old phaeton, well garnished with children, and a couple of
sticks in the rough peeping out of the apron, Gustavus James held up in his
mother's arms, with the curly blue feather nodding over his nose. There is
also Farmer Peastraw, and faces that a patient inspection enables us to
appropriate to Dribble, and Hook, and Capon, and Calcot, and Lumpleg, and
Crane of Crane Hall, and Charley Slapp of red-coat times--people look so
different in plain clothes to what they do in hunting ones.
Pages:
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941
942
943
944
945