Mr. George, after laughing cheerfully and clapping him on the shoulder, assists in these arrangements and helps to get the gallery into business order. That done, he takes a turn at the dumbbells, and afterwards weighing himself and opining that he is getting “too fleshy,” engages with great gravity in solitary broadsword practice. Meanwhile Phil has fallen to work at his usual table, where he screws and unscrews, and cleans, and files, and whistles into small apertures, and blackens himself more and more, and seems to do and undo everything that can be done and undone about a gun.
Master and man are at length disturbed by footsteps in the passage, where they make an unusual sound, denoting the arrival of unusual company. These steps, advancing nearer and nearer to the gallery, bring into it a group at first sight scarcely reconcilable with any day in the year but the fifth of November.
It consists of a limp and ugly figure carried in a chair by two bearers and attended by a lean female with a face like a pinched mask, who might be expected immediately to recite the popular verses commemorative of the time when they did contrive to blow Old England up alive but for her keeping her lips tightly and defiantly closed as the chair is put down. At which point the figure in it gasping, “Oh Lord! Oh, dear me! I am shaken!” adds, “How de do, my dear friend, how de do?” Mr. George then descries, in the procession, the venerable Mr. Smallweed out for an airing, attended by his granddaughter Judy as bodyguard.
“ Mr. George, my dear friend,” says Grandfather Smallweed, removing his right arm from the neck of one of his bearers, whom he has nearly throttled coming along, “how de do? You’re surprised to see me, my dear friend.”
“I should hardly have been more surprised to have seen your friend in the city,” returns Mr. George.