"but you'd better have a bit of somethin', sir; - a cup of strong
tea, or somethin'. Mr. Smalls, sir, when he were pleasant, he always
had beer, sir; but p'raps you ain't been used to bein' pleasant, sir,
and slops might suit you better, sir."

"Oh, any thing, any thing!" groaned our poor, unheroic hero, as he
turned his face to the wall, and endeavoured to recollect in what way
he had been "pleasant" the night before. But, alas! the wells of his
memory had, for the time, been poisoned, and nothing clear or pure
could be drawn therefrom. So he got up and looked at himself in the
glass, and scarcely recognized the tangled-haired, sallow-faced
wretch, whose bloodshot eyes gazed heavily at him from the mirror.
So he nervously drained the water-bottle, and buried himself once
more among the tossed and tumbled bed-clothes.

The tea really did him some good, and enabled him to recover
sufficient nerve to go feebly through the operation of dressing;
though it was lucky that nature had not yet brought Mr. Verdant Green
to the necessity of shaving, for the handling of a razor might have
been attended with suicidal results, and have brought these veracious
memoirs and their hero to an untimely end.

He had just sat down to a second edition of tea, and was reading a
letter that the post had brought him from his sister Mary, in which
she said, "I dare say by this time you have found Mr. Charles Larkyns
a very ~delightful~ companion, and I ~am sure~ a very ~valuable~ one;
as, from what the rector says, he appears to be so ~steady~, and has
such ~nice quiet~ companions:" - our hero had read as far as this,
when a great noise just without his door, caused the letter to drop
from his trembling hands; and, between loud ~fanfares~ from a