ated to its gifted
writer's interview with Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap, Titmouse read
in a kind of spasm--he could not draw a breath, and felt a choking
sensation coming over him. After a while, "I may spare myself," thought
he, "the trouble of rigging out--Huckaback has done my business for me
with Messrs. Quirk, Gammon, and Snap!--Mine will only be a walk in
vain!" And this cursed call of Huckaback's, too, to have happened after
what had occurred last night between Titmouse and them!! and so urgently
as he had been enjoined to keep the matter to himself! Of course,
Huckaback would seem to have been sent by him; seeing he appeared to
have assumed the hectoring tone which Titmouse had tried so vainly
over-night, and now so bitterly repented of; and he had no doubt grossly
insulted the arbiters of Titmouse's destiny, (for he knew Huckaback's
impudence)--he had even said that he (Titmouse) would not be GAMMONED by
them! But time was pressing--the experiment must be made; and with a
beating heart he scrambled into a change of clothes--bottling up his
wrath against the unconscious Huckaback till he should see that worthy.
In a miserable state of mind he set off soon after for Saffron Hill at a
quick pace, which soon became a trot, and often sharpened into a
downright run. He saw, heard, and thought of nothing, as he hurried
along Oxford Street and Holborn, but Quirk, Gammon, Snap, and Huckaback,
and the reception which the last-mentioned gentleman might have secured
for him--if, indeed, he was to be received at all. The magical words,
_Ten Thousand a-year_, had not disappeared from the field of his
troubled vision; but how faintly and dimly they shone!--like the
Pleiades coldly glistening through intervening mists far off--oh! at
what a stupendous, immeasurable, and hopeless distance! Imagine those
stars gazed at by the anguished and despairing eyes of the bereaved
lover, madly believing one of them to contain HER who has just departed
from his arms, and from this world, and you may form a notion of the
agonizing feelings--the absorbed contemplation of one dear, dazzling,
but distant object, experienced on this occasion by Mr. Titmouse. No,
no; I don't mean seriously to pretend that so grand a thought as this
_could_ be entertained by his little optics intellectual; you might as
well suppose the tiny eye of a black beetle to be scanning the vague,
fanciful, and mysterious figure and proportions of Orion, or a kangaroo
to