be safe to offer it. You'd faint away, only to see me a comin' at a mild trot round the corner."
To convey a slight idea of the effect of this approach, Mr. Bailey counterfeited in his own person the action of a high-trotting horse, and threw up his head so high, in backing against a pump, that he shook his hat off.
"Why, he's own uncle to Capricorn," said Bailey, "and brother to Cauliflower. He's been through the winders of two chancy shops since we've had him, and wos sold for killin' his missis. That's a horse, I hope?"
"Ah! you 'll never want to buy any more red-polls, now," observed Poll, looking on his young friend with an air of melancholy. "You 'll never want to buy any more red-polls now, to hang up over the sink, will you?"
"I should think not," replied Bailey. "Reether so. I wouldn't have nothin' to say to any bird below a Peacock; and he'd be wulgar. Well, how are you?"
"Oh! I'm pretty well," said Poll. He answered the question again because Mr. Bailey asked it again; Mr. Bailey asked it again, because—accompanied with a straddling action of the white cords, a bend of the knees, and a striking-forth of the top-boots—it was an easy, horse-fleshy, turfy sort of thing to do.
"Wot are you up to, old feller?" asked Mr. Bailey, with the same graceful rakishness. He was quite the man-about-town of the conversation, while the easy-shaver was the child.
"Why, I am going to fetch my lodger home," said Paul.
"A woman!" cried Mr. Bailey, "for a twenty-pun' note!"
The little barber hastened to explain that she was neither a young woman, nor a handsome woman, but a nurse, who had been acting as a kind of housekeeper to a gentleman for some weeks past, and left her place that night, in consequence of being superseded by another and a more legitimate housekeeper: to wit, the gentleman's bride.
"He's newly-married, and he brings his young wife home to-night," said the barber. "So I'm going to fetch my lodger away—Mr. Chuzzlewit's, close behind the Post-office—and carry her box for her."
"Jonas Chuzzlewit's?" said Bailey.
"Ah?" returned Paul: "that's the name, sure enough. Do you know him?"
"Oh, no!" cried Mr. Bailey; "not at all. And I don't know her? Not neither? Why, they first kept company through me, a'most."
"Ah?" said Paul.
"Ah!" said Mr. Bailey, with a wink; "and she ain't bad-looking, mind you. But her sister was the best. She was the merry one. I often used to have a bit of fun with her, in the hold times!"
Mr. Bailey spoke as if he already had a leg and three-quarters in the grave, and this had happened twenty or thirty years ago. Paul Sweedlepipe, the meek, was so perfectly confounded by his precocious self-possession, and his patronising manner, as well as by his boots, cockade, and livery, that a mist swam before his eyes, and he saw—not the Bailey of acknowledged juvenility, from Todgers's Commercial Boarding House,
