'
CHAPTER 42
Illustrative of the convivial Sentiment, that the best of Friends must
sometimes part
The pavement of Snow Hill had been baking and frying all day in the
heat, and the twain Saracens' heads guarding the entrance to the
hostelry of whose name and sign they are the duplicate presentments,
looked--or seemed, in the eyes of jaded and footsore passers-by, to
look--more vicious than usual, after blistering and scorching in the
sun, when, in one of the inn's smallest sitting-rooms, through whose
open window there rose, in a palpable steam, wholesome exhalations from
reeking coach-horses, the usual furniture of a tea-table was displayed
in neat and inviting order, flanked by large joints of roast and boiled,
a tongue, a pigeon pie, a cold fowl, a tankard of ale, and other little
matters of the like kind, which, in degenerate towns and cities, are
generally understood to belong more particularly to solid lunches,
stage-coach dinners, or unusually substantial breakfasts.
Mr John Browdie, with his hands in his pockets, hovered restlessly about
these delicacies, stopping occasionally to whisk the flies out of the
sugar-basin with his wife's pocket-handkerchief, or to dip a teaspoon in
the milk-pot and carry it to his mouth, or to cut off a little knob of
crust, and a little corner of meat, and swallow them at two gulps like a
couple of pills.
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