It is half-past five o’clock, and an autumn afternoon, when the reader and Solomon Gills become acquainted. Solomon Gills is in the act of seeing what time it is by the unimpeachable chronometer. The usual daily clearance has been making in the City for an hour or more; and the human tide is still rolling westward. “The streets have thinned,” as Mr Gills says, “very much.” It threatens to be wet tonight. All the weatherglasses in the shop are in low spirits, and the rain already shines upon the cocked hat of the wooden Midshipman.
“Where’s Walter, I wonder!” said Solomon Gills, after he had carefully put up the chronometer again. “Here’s dinner been ready, half an hour, and no Walter!”
Turning round upon his stool behind the counter, Mr Gills looked out among the instruments in the window, to see if his nephew might be crossing the road. No. He was not among the bobbing umbrellas, and he certainly was not the newspaper boy in the oilskin cap who was slowly working his way along the piece of brass outside, writing his name over Mr Gills’s name with his forefinger.
“If I didn’t know he was too fond of me to make a run of it, and go and enter himself aboard ship against my wishes, I should begin to be fidgetty,” said Mr Gills, tapping two or three weather-glasses with his knuckles. “I really should. All in the Downs, eh! Lots of moisture! Well! it’s wanted.”
“I believe,” said Mr Gills, blowing the dust off the glass top of a compass-case, “that you don’t point more direct and due to the back parlour than the boy’s inclination does after all. And the parlour couldn’t bear straighter either. Due north. Not the twentieth part of a point either way.”
“Halloa, Uncle Sol!”
“Halloa, my boy!” cried the Instrument-maker, turning briskly round. “What! you are here, are you?”
A cheerful looking, merry boy, fresh with running home in the rain; fair-faced, bright-eyed, and curly-haired.
“Well, Uncle, how have you got on without me all day? Is dinner ready? I’m so hungry.”
“As to getting on,” said Solomon good-naturedly, “it would be odd if I couldn’t get on without a young dog like you a great deal better than with you. As to dinner being ready, it’s been ready this half hour and waiting for you. As to being hungry, I am!”