To have seen Miss Squeers now, divested of the brown beaver, the green veil, and the blue curl-papers, and arrayed in all the virgin splendour of a white frock and spencer, with a white muslin bonnet, and an imitative damask rose in full bloom on the inside thereof: her luxuriant crop of hair arranged in curls so tight that it was impossible they could come out by any accident, and her bonnet-cap trimmed with little damask roses, which might be supposed to be so many promising scions of the big one—to have seen all this, and to have seen the broad damask belt, matching both the family rose and the little ones, which encircled her slender waist, and by a happy ingenuity took off from the shortness of the spencer behind,—to have beheld all this, and to have taken further into account the coral bracelets (rather short of beads, and with a very visible black string) which clasped her wrists, and the coral necklace which rested on her neck, supporting outside her frock a lonely cornelian heart, typical of her own disengaged affections—to have contemplated all these mute but expressive appeals to the purest feelings of our nature, might have thawed the frost of age, and added new and inextinguishable fuel to the fire of youth.
The waiter was touched. Waiter as he was, he had human passions and feelings, and he looked very hard at Miss Squeers as he handed the muffins.
"Is my pa in, do you know?" asked Miss Squeers with dignity.
"Beg your pardon. Miss."
"My pa," repeated Miss Squeers; "is he in?"
"In where, Miss?"
"In here—in the house!" replied Miss Squeers. "My pa—Mr. Wackford Squeers—he's stopping here. Is he at home?"
"I didn't know there was any gen'lman of that name in the house, Miss," replied the waiter. "There may be, in the coffee-room."
May be. Very pretty this, indeed! Here was Miss Squeers, who had been depending all the way to London upon showing her friends how much at home she would be, and how much respectful notice her name and connexions would excite, told that her father might be there! "As if he was a feller!" observed Miss Squeers, with emphatic indignation.
"Ye'd betther inquire, mun," said John Browdie. "An' bond up another pigeon-pie, will 'ee? Dang the chap," muttered John, looking into the empty dish as the waiter retired; "Does he ca' this a pie-three yoong pigeons and a troifling matther o' steak, and a crust so loight that you doant know when it's in your mooth and when it's gane? I wonder hoo many pies goes to a breakfast!"
After a short interval, which John Browdie employed upon the ham and a cold round of beef, the waiter returned with another pie, and the information that Mr. Squeers was not stopping in the house, but that he came there every day, and that directly he arrived he should be shown up-stairs. With this he retired; and he had not retired two minutes, when he returned with Mr. Squeers and his hopeful son.
"Why, who'd have thought of this?" said Mr. queers, when he
