Nicholas promised to do so if he could, and drawing a chair near the fire, fell into conversation with the manager at once. He was very talkative and communicative, stimulated perhaps not only by his natural disposition, but by the spirits and water he sipped very plentifully, or the snuff which he took in large quantities from a piece of whitey -brown paper in his waistcoat pocket. He laid open his affairs without the smallest reserve, and descanted at some length upon the merits of his company, and the acquirements of his family, of both of which the two broad-sword boys formed an honourable portion. There was to be a gathering it seemed of the different ladies and gentlemen at Portsmouth on the morrow, whither the father and sons were proceeding (not for the regular season, but in the course of a wandering speculation), after fulfilling an engagement at Guildford with the greatest applause.
"You are going that way?" asked the manager.
"Ye-yes," said Nicholas. "Yes, I am."
"Do you know the town at all?" inquired the manager, who seemed to consider himself entitled to the same confidence as he had himself exhibited.
"No," replied Nicholas.
"Never there?"
"Never."
Mr. Vincent Crummles gave a short dry cough, as much as to say, "If you won't be communicative, you won't;" and took so many pinches of snuff from the piece of paper, one after another, that Nicholas quite wondered where it all went to.
While he was thus engaged, Mr. Crummles looked from time to time with great interest at Smike, with whom he had appeared considerably struck from the first. He had now fallen asleep, and was nodding in his chair.
"Excuse my saying so," said the manager, leaning over to Nicholas, and sinking his voice, "but—what a capital countenance your friend has got!"
"Poor fellow!" said Nicholas, with a half smile, "I wish it were a little more plump and less haggard."
"Plump!" exclaimed the manager, quite horrified, "you'd spoil it for ever."
"Do you think so?"
"Think so, sir! Why, as he is now," said the manager, striking his knee emphatically; "without a pad upon his body, and hardly a touch of paint upon his face, he'd make such an actor for the starved business as was never seen in this country. Only let him be tolerably well up in the Apothecary in Romeo and Juliet with the slightest possible dab of red on the tip of his nose, and he'd be certain of three rounds the moment he put his head out of the practicable door in the front grooves 0. P."
"You view him with a professional eye," said Nicholas, laughing.
"And well I may," rejoined the manager, "I never saw a young fellow so regularly cut out for that line since I've been in the profession, and I played the heavy children when I was eighteen months old."
