“Bravo! Heel over toe⁠—cut and shuffle⁠—pay away at it, Zephyr! I’m smothered if the opera house isn’t your proper hemisphere. Keep it up! Hooray!” These expressions, delivered in a most boisterous tone, and accompanied with loud peals of laughter, roused Mr. Pickwick from one of those sound slumbers which, lasting in reality some half-hour, seem to the sleeper to have been protracted for three weeks or a month.

The voice had no sooner ceased than the room was shaken with such violence that the windows rattled in their frames, and the bedsteads trembled again. Mr. Pickwick started up, and remained for some minutes fixed in mute astonishment at the scene before him.