‘I see it,’ replied Sam, with a placid nod of the head.
‘You wouldn’t think to find such a room as this in the Farringdon Hotel, would you?’ said Mr. Roker, with a complacent smile.
To this Mr. Weller replied with an easy and unstudied closing of one eye; which might be considered to mean, either that he would have thought it, or that he would not have thought it, or that he had never thought anything at all about it, as the observer’s imagination suggested. Having executed this feat, and reopened his eye, Mr. Weller proceeded to inquire which was the individual bedstead that Mr. Roker had so flatteringly described as an out-and-outer to sleep in.
‘That’s it,’ replied Mr. Roker, pointing to a very rusty one in a corner. ‘It would make any one go to sleep, that bedstead would, whether they wanted to or not.’
‘I should think,’ said Sam, eyeing the piece of furniture in question with a look of excessive disgust—‘I should think poppies was nothing to it.’
‘Nothing at all,’ said Mr. Roker.
‘And I s’pose,’ said Sam, with a sidelong glance at his master, as if to see whether there were any symptoms of his determination being shaken by what passed, ‘I s’pose the other gen’l’men as sleeps here are gen’l’men.’
‘Nothing but it,’ said Mr. Roker. ‘One of ‘em takes his twelve pints of ale a day, and never leaves off smoking even at his meals.’
‘He must be a first-rater,’ said Sam.
‘A1,’ replied Mr. Roker.