“I’ll take a seat till he does come,” observed Sapid, gloomily.
Spry and the clerk laid their heads together in the most distant corner of the little office.
“Has he got a stick?” whispered one.
“No, and he isn’t remarkable big, nuther.”
“Any bit of paper in his hand—does he look like State House and a libel suit? It’s a’most time—not had a new suit for a week.”
“Not much; and, as we didn’t have any scrouger in the Gun yesterday, perhaps he wants to have somebody tickled up himself. Send him in.”
St. Sebastian Sockdolager, Esq., the editor of The National Pop-gun and Universal Valve Trumpet, sat at a green table, elucidating an idea by the aid of a steel pen and whity-brown paper, and therefore St. Sebastian Sockdolager did not look up when Mr. Sapid entered the sanctum. The abstraction may, perhaps, have been a sample of literary stage effect; but it is certain that the pen pursued the idea with the speed and directness of a steeple-chase, straight across the paper, and direful was the scratching thereof. The luckless idea being at last fairly run down and its brush cut off, Mr. Sockdolager threw himself back into his chair with a smile of triumph.
“Tickletoby,” said he, rumpling his hair into heroic expansiveness.
“What?” exclaimed Sapid, rather nervously.
“My dear sir, I didn’t see you—a thousand pardons! Pray what can be done for you in our line?”