of the soup; and the waiter of the American dining-room can scarcely
place a dish upon the board without making it eloquent of a blighted
existence.) Having dashed the stews upon the reading-table before the
fire, and rescued a drowning fly[1] from one of them with his least
appetizing thumb-nail, the melancholy Irish attendant polished the
spoons with his pocket-handkerchief and hurled them on either side of
the plates. Perceiving that his German associate, in listlessly throwing
the mugs of ale upon the table, had spilled some of the liquid, he
hurriedly wiped the stain away with EDWIN DROOD'S worsted muffler, and
dried the sides of the glasses upon the napkin intended for Mr. DIBBLE'S
use. There was something of the wild resources of despair, too, in this
man's frequent ghostly dispatch of the German after articles forgotten
in the first trip, such as another cracker, the cover of the
pepper-cruet, the salt, and one more pinch of butter; and so greatly did
his apparent dejection of soul increase as each supplementary luxury
arrived and was recklessly slammed into its place, that, upon finally
retiring from the room with his associate, his utter hopelessness of
aspect gave little suggestion of the future proud political preferment
to which, by virtue of his low estate and foreign birth, he was
assuredly destined.

[Footnote 1: In anticipation of any critical objection to the
introduction of a living _fly_ in _December_, the Adapter begs leave to
suspect than an anachronism is always legitimate in a work of fiction
when a point is to be made. Thus, in Chapter VIII of the inimitable
"NICHOLAS NICKLEBY," Mr. SQUEERS tells NICHOLAS that morning has come,
"and _ready iced_, too;" and that "the pump's _froze_," while, only a
few pages later, in the same chapter, one of Mr. SQUEERS' scholars is
spoken of as "weeding the garden."]