“Bless my soul!—how extraordinary! Who on earth could have brought this thing here?—and whatever could they have been doing, for it to get thrown down on its side in this manner? It’s very odd,—very odd, indeed!” exclaimed the Major, as he stood for a minute or two, eyeing it suspiciously behind his glasses.
But, nothing resulting from his profound reflections, Major Oldschool lifted up the chair from its recumbent position, and having placed it on its legs, sat himself down in it to try what kind of accommodation it might afford a gentleman of his “build.”
“‘Pon my soul!” he inwardly ejaculated, as he wriggled himself into the seat, and rested his shoulders against the back; “it’s deuced comfortable—just suits me, for all the world, as if it was made to measure! Precious deal better than those d—d “confessionals” that they have now, and that keep you as upright as a ramrod, and shove your knees almost into your mouth; or those cursed Yankee things, that keep you on the wabble like a rocking-horse, and make you look as rickety and short-legged as one of those Italian ‘tombelas.’”
“A-ah!” he exclaimed, with great gusto, as he stretched himself far back in his new seat, “there’s nothing like your good old-fashioned arm-chair, after all, with double the regulation allowance of horse-hair.” Then stretching his arms above his head as he yawned, he added, “‘Pon my word, if it wasn’t for the swarms of flies at my bald head, I do think I should drop off to sleep in the chair, for really it is so precious comfortable and I got up so plaguey early, that it’s as much as I can do to keep my eyelids apart. Well, bless me, those Sandboys are long enough pipe-claying their facings; if I’d known only as much, I might have managed to have treated myself to forty winks more this morning, instead of being up with the milk.”
“‘Pon my life!” he cried, as he shook himself after the first drowsy nod, “if the ladies are not down soon, they’ll find me driving my pigs to market when they do come;” then, suddenly giving a violent pat on his forehead, that ‘went off’ like a percussion cap, he exclaimed, “D—n the flies, how they do bite;—and I was just dropping off so nicely;—there is no resting for the sharp, needle-like things,—one would fancy my head was a small sugar-cask, from the way in which they dig their proboscises into it. D—n the flies!” he roared again, giving his cranium another and a harder slap; “they’ll pick me to the bone if they go on in this way.” Then, to screen himself from the flies, he seized the red moreen curtain that hung close beside the chair in which he was seated, and withdrawing it from the brass sunflower-like pin, threw it over him, so that his whole body was concealed behind its drapery, and there was no trace of him to be seen, beyond his wooden leg, which struck straight out from the side of the curtain, and had very much the appearance of the handle of the cinder-sifter, as it projects half out of the dust-bin.
In a few minutes, what with the warmth of the day, the early rising, and the relief from the fangs of his tiny tormentors, the flies, the Major was dead asleep.
It was at this critical point that Mrs. Pilchers descended the stairs to see how the carpenter was proceeding with the transmogrification of the arm-chair, into a nurse’s ditto—and as she bobbed her head in at the parlour door, she discovered, to her great surprise, that the room was apparently empty.
With that due regard to the interest of “her lady” which distinguishes every “monthly nuss,” when in no way benefited by the defrauding of her, Mrs. Pilchers proceeded to search the house in a state of high excitement for the truant journeyman, and learning from Mrs. Fokesell that the man was engaged in the drawing-room, at an odd job for her, the consciousness that this same odd job was being performed at “her lady’s” expense, caused Mrs. Pilchers, in the height of her indignation, to give a jerk of her christening cap, that made its ultramarine geraniums bob backwards and forwards on their wire stalks like the ship in the paper sea of the clock-work pictures. The “nuss” then bounced out of the kitchen as if she were a baby’s india-rubber ball, inflated with anger, mentally dilating on the “unheerd on imperence” of the act, and made the best of her way to the first floor in quest of her carpenter.
Having called the man out of the room, Mrs. Pilchers communicated to him “just a bit of her mind” on the heinousness of his allowing “any one” to take an hour of his time out of “her lady’s half day;” and having lectured the carpenter in her most moral style, she desired him to take his tools down that minute and do the chair, or she would have in “somebody what would.”
The poor man, who, like the rest of the “jobbing operatives,” was of rather an obsequious, if not servile turn, stammered out an apology, and returned in a state of considerable flurry to the drawing-room to fetch the saw required for the operation.