“Well, I think I may. But the very looks of you are unsettling,” Mrs. Bagnet rejoins. “Ah George, George! If you had only settled down, and married Joe Pouch's widow when he died in North America, she'd have combed your hair for you.”
“It was a chance for me, certainly,” returns the trooper, half-laughingly, half-seriously, “but I shall never settle dovrn into a respectable man now. Joe Pouch's widow might have done me good—there was something in her—and something of her—but I couldn't make up my mind to it. If I had had the luck to meet with such a wife as Mat found!”
Mrs. Bagnet, who seems in a virtuous way to be under little reserve with a good sort of fellow, but to be another good sort of fellow herself for that matter, receives this compliment by flicking Mr. George in the face with a head of greens, and taking her tub into the Little room behind the shop.
“Why, Quebec, my poppet,” says George, following, on invitation, into that apartment. “And little Malta, too! Come and kiss your Blufly!”
These young ladies—not supposed to have been actually christened by the names applied to them, though always so called in the family, from the places of their birth in barracks—are respectively employed on three-legged stools: the younger (some five or six years old), in learning her letters out of a penny primer: the elder (eight or nine perhaps), in teaching her, and sewing with great assiduity. Both hail Mr. George with acclamations as an old friend, and after some kissing and romping plant their stools beside him.
“And how's Young Woolwich?” says Mr. George.
“Ah! There now!” cries Mrs. Bagnet, turning about from her sauce-pans (for she is cooking dinner), with a bright flush on her face. “Would you believe it? Got an engagement at the Theayter, 'with his father, to play the fife in a military piece.”
“Well done, my godson!” cries Mr. George, slapping his thigh.
“I believe you!” says Mrs. Bagnet. “He's a Briton. That's what Woolwich is. A Briton.”
“And Mat blows away at his bassoon, and you're respectable civilians one and all,” says Mr. George. “Family people. Children gromng up. Mat's old mother in Scotland, and your old father somewhere else, corresponded with; and helped a little; and—well, well! To be sure, I don't know why I shouldn't be wished a hundred mile away, for I have not much to do with all this!”
Mr. George is becoming thoughtful; sitting before the fire in the white-washed room, which has a sanded floor, and a barrack smell, and contains nothing superfluous, and has not a visible speck of dirt or dust in it, from the faces of Quebec and Malta to the bright tin pots and pannikins upon the dresser shelves;—Mr. George is becoming thoughtful, sitting here while Mrs. Bagnet is busy, when Mr. Bagnet and Young Woolwich opportunely come home. Mr. Bagnet is an ex-artilleryman, tall and upright, with shaggy eyebrows, and whiskers like the fibres of a cocoanut, not a hair upon his head, and a torrid complexion. His voice, short, deep, and resonant, is not at all unlike the tones of the instrument to which he is devoted. Indeed there may be generally observed in him an unbending, unyielding, brass-bound air, as if he were himself the bassoon of the human orchestra. Young Woolwich is the type and model of a young drummer.
Both father and son salute the trooper heartily. He saying, in due
