had any taste, she might surely pick up some better fellow than that.’

Here Tom's eye wandered from the glass on the chimney-piece to the

glass on the table; and as he felt himself becoming gradually

sentimental, he emptied the fourth tumbler of punch and ordered a

fifth.

'Tom Smart, gentlemen, had always been very much attached to the

public line. It had been long his ambition to stand in a bar of his own,

in a green coat, knee-cords, and tops. He had a great notion of taking

the chair at convivial dinners, and he had often thought how well he

could preside in a room of his own in the talking way, and what a

capital example he could set to his customers in the drinking

department. All these things passed rapidly through Tom's mind as he

sat drinking the hot punch by the roaring fire, and he felt very justly

and properly indignant that the tall man should be in a fair way of

keeping such an excellent house, while he, Tom Smart, was as far off

from it as ever. So, after deliberating over the two last tumblers,

whether he hadn't a perfect right to pick a quarrel with the tall man

for having contrived to get into the good graces of the buxom widow,

Tom Smart at last arrived at the satisfactory conclusion that he was a

very ill-used and persecuted individual, and had better go to bed.

'Up a wide and ancient staircase the smart girl preceded Tom, shading

the chamber candle with her hand, to protect it from the currents of

air which in such a rambling old place might have found plenty of

room to disport themselves in, without blowing the candle out, but

which did blow it out nevertheless - thus affording Tom's enemies an

opportunity of asserting that it was he, and not the wind, who

extinguished the candle, and that while he pretended to be blowing it

alight again, he was in fact kissing the girl. Be this as it may, another

light was obtained, and Tom was conducted through a maze of rooms,

and a labyrinth of passages, to the apartment which had been

prepared for his reception, where the girl bade him good-night and left

him alone.

It was a good large room with big closets, and a bed which might have

served for a whole boarding-school, to say nothing of a couple of

oaken presses that would have held the baggage of a small army; but

what struck Tom's fancy most was a strange, grim-looking, high

backed chair, carved in the most fantastic manner, with a flowered

damask cushion, and the round knobs at the bottom of the legs

carefully tied up in red cloth, as if it had got the gout in its toes. Of

any other queer chair, Tom would only have thought it was a queer

chair, and there would have been an end of the matter; but there was

something about this particular chair, and yet he couldn't tell what it

was, so odd and so unlike any other piece of furniture he had ever

seen, that it seemed to fascinate him. He sat down before the fire, and

The Pickwick Papers