“My friend, Mr. Sawyer,” interposed Mr. Pickwick, “your son’s friend.”
“Oh,” said Mr. Winkle the elder, looking rather grimly at Bob. “I hope you are well, sir?”
“Right as a trivet, sir,” replied Bob Sawyer.
Mr. Winkle senior
“This other gentleman,” cried Mr. Pickwick, “is, as you will see, when you have read the letter with which I am entrusted, a very near relative or, I should rather say, a very particular friend of your son’s. His name is Allen.”
“That gentleman?” inquired Mr. Winkle, pointing with the card towards Ben Allen, who had fallen asleep in an attitude which left nothing of him visible but his spine and his coat collar.
Mr. Pickwick was on the point of replying to the question, and reciting Mr. Benjamin Allen’s name and honourable distinctions at full length, when the sprightly Mr. Bob Sawyer, with a view of rousing his friend to a sense of his situation, inflicted a startling pinch upon the fleshy part of his arm, which caused him to jump up with a shriek. Suddenly aware that he was in the presence of a stranger, Mr. Ben Allen advanced and, shaking Mr. Winkle most affectionately by both hands for about five minutes, murmured, in some half-intelligible fragments of sentences, the great delight he felt in seeing him, and a hospitable inquiry whether he felt disposed to take anything after his walk, or would prefer waiting “till dinner time;” which done, he sat down and gazed about him with a petrified stare, as if he had not the remotest idea where he was, which indeed he had not.