"
EDWIN DROOD regains his feet with alacrity and casts aside his shawl.
"Whatever you thought, uncle, I am still a single man, although your way
of coming down on a chap was enough to make me beside myself. Any grub,
JACK?"
With a check upon his enthusiasm and a sudden gloom of expression
amounting almost to a squint, Mr. BUMSTEAD motions with his whole right
side toward an adjacent room in which a table is spread, and leads the
way thither in a half-circle.
"Ah, this is prime!" cries the young fellow, rubbing his hands; the
while he realizes that Mr. BUMSTEAD'S squint is an attempt to include
both himself and the picture over the mantel in the next room in one
incredibly complicated look.
Not much is said during dinner, as the strength of the boarding-house
butter requires all the nephew's energies for single combat with it, and
the uncle is so absorbed in a dreamy effort to make a salad with his
hash and all the contents of the castor, that he can attend to nothing
else. At length the cloth is drawn, EDWIN produces some peanuts from his
pocket and passes some to Mr. BUMSTEAD, and the latter, with a wet towel
pinned about his head, drinks a great deal of water.
"This is Sissy's birthday, you know, JACK," says the nephew, with a
squint through the door and around the corner of the adjoining apartment
toward the crude picture over the mantel, "and, if our respective
respected parents hadn't bound us by will to marry, I'd be mad after
her.
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