rn a penny, and make two and nine-pence into
three and a penny? I shouldn't _quite_ come Captain Stiff over him, I
think, just at first; but I should treat him with a kind of an air, too,
as if--hem! 'Pon my life! how delightful! (A sigh and a pause.) Yes, I
should often come to the shop. Gad, it would be half the fun of my
fortune! How they would envy me, to be sure! How one should enjoy it! I
wouldn't think of _marrying_ till--and yet I won't say either; if I got
among some of them out-and-outers--those first-rate articles--that lady,
for instance, the other day in the Park--I should like to see her cut me
as she did, with ten thousand a-year in my pocket! Why, she'd be running
after _me_!--or there's no truth in novels, which I'm sure there's often
a great deal in. Oh, of course, I might marry whom I pleased! Who
couldn't be got with ten thousand a-year? (Another pause.) I think I
should go abroad to Russia directly; for they tell me there's a man
lives there who could dye this cussed hair of mine any color I
liked--and--egad! I'd come home as black as a crow, and hold up my head
as high as any of them! While I was about it, I'd have a touch at my
eyebrows"---- Crash here went all his castle-building, at the sound of
his tea-kettle, hissing, whizzing, sputtering, in the agonies of boiling
over; as if the intolerable heat of the fire had driven desperate the
poor creature placed upon it, which instinctively tried thus to
extinguish the cause of its anguish. Having taken it off, and placed it
upon the hob, and put on the fire a tiny fragment of fresh coal, he
began to make preparations for shaving, by pouring some of the hot water
into an old tea-cup, which was presently to serve for the purposes of
breakfast. Then he spread out a bit of crumpled whity-brown paper, in
which had been folded up a couple of cigars, bought over-night for the
Sunday's special enjoyment--and as to which, if he supposed they had
come from any place beyond the four seas, I imagine him to have been
slightly mistaken. He placed this bit of paper on the little
mantel-piece; drew his solitary well-worn razor several times across the
palm of his left hand; dipped his brush, worn, within half an inch, to
the stump, into the hot water; presently passed it over so much of his
face as he intended to shave; then rubbed on the damp surface a bit of
yellow soap--and in less than five minutes Mr. Titmouse was a shaved
man. But mark--don't suppose that he had