Joseph was heard to mutter something, and then he went forth in his best livery of pale blue with yellow facings and black knee-breeches, to finish his toilet for the night.
“Oh, here you are, then,” exclaimed Joseph, upon reaching his pantry, a peculiarly close, stuffy little room, smelling very strongly of sink, and furnished with two cupboards, a bracket-flap, and what looked like a third detached cupboard, but which was really the turn-up bedstead on which Joseph slept.
“Yes, here I am, Joey,” said a husky-voiced little red-nosed man, with a very blotchy, pimply face, to wit Isaac Buddy, the sole proprietor of a roomy old-fashioned Clarence fly, which was drawn by a very small shambling horse.
This conveyance was Mr Isaac Buddy’s means of livelihood, for it was to let, as his cards said, “by the day, night, or job,” and the hiring of Mr Isaac Buddy’s fly meant not only, as a matter of course, the hire of the horse to draw it, but of Mr Isaac Buddy himself.
For, out of deference to the feelings and aristocratic ideas of certain of the ladies residing in the private apartments, Mr Buddy had become an actor, who played many parts, and though the fiction was perfectly well understood, nobody ever thought of smiling if they saw Mr Isaac Buddy in a hat with a tarnished gold band on Mondays as Lady Anna Maria Morton’s coachman, or in a hat with a silver band on Tuesday, as Miss Tees’, or on Wednesday in a very hard shiny glazed hat without any nap, as Mrs Mongloff’s, or on other days in costumes to suit.
The Clarence fly of course remained the same, but it was always disguised in a more sounding name, and became “the carriage.”
“There ain’t a drop o’ nothing about handy, is there, Joey?” said Mr Buddy, as the thin footman set the tray down upon the bracket-flap.
“No, that there ain’t,” said Joseph, “without you’d like the pot filled up and have a cup o’ tea.”
“G’orn with yer. Did you ever know me wash myself out with warm water? How’s the old gals?”
“Old style,” replied Joseph; “but I say, Buddy, just cast your eye round as they’re getting in: the young ladies have been done up to rights.”