Slowgoe. Just like the lower orders. No respect for real rank.
Nutts. I haven’t thought much of any of the creturs lately; but I assure you, when Parliament ’sembles I shall keep my eye as sharp as a needle’s pint upon ’em. In the meanwhile, gentlemen, considerin’ this is the new year, if you will take so short a notice, I shall be proud to see you, your wives and sweethearts, to a dance in the shop to-morrow night, which, somehow or the other, we’ll manage to enlarge for the occasion.
Slowgoe. I’ve no objection, for one. But mind, none of your fangled brass stuff, your cornets-a-piston, and all that. Let’s have a good English fiddle and a constitutional clarionet. And none of your quodrilling, and polkys; but a straightforward country-dance, and a legitimate four-handed reel. And mind, none of your fellars from the orchestra of the opera: if there’s a foreigner here with moustachers, I take my hat.
Nutts. No objection, I hope, to a Scotch bagpipe and an Irish harp?
Slowgoe. Why, no.
Nutts. Very well, you shall have ’em; and more than that, a hornpipe danced to ’em in character, by a young gentleman who lives at Mrs Biggleswade’s over the way, and goes on in one of the pantomimes as the “British Lion.”
Mrs Nutts. He’s promised me to come in his skin, and I’m sure it will be beautiful.
And for awhile turning from the fierceness of politics, raging all the year round in Nutts’ shaving-shop, it was beautiful to see how Nutts and the customers, with wives and sweethearts, danced on New-Year’s night. Mr Nutts led off Mrs Biggleswade from over the way; the hornpipe of the “British Lion” was danced to admiration;—and, in the full flush of the festivity, it is said that Mr Peabody, the scholarly policeman, furtively saluted Mrs Nutts, when that unsuspecting woman stood immediately beneath the mistletoe. This, however, could hardly be, since the very next morning Mrs Nutts herself declared to Mrs Biggleswade over the way, “that that Mr Peabody was too good for the police; he was such a gentleman.”
