After
settling this point, he began to be conscious that he was getting
sleepy; whereupon he took his nightcap out of the pocket in
which he had had the precaution to stow it in the morning, and,
leisurely undressing himself, got into bed and fell asleep.
'Bravo! Heel over toe--cut and shuffle--pay away at it,
Zephyr! I'm smothered if the opera house isn't your proper
hemisphere. Keep it up! Hooray!' These expressions, delivered
in a most boisterous tone, and accompanied with loud peals of
laughter, roused Mr. Pickwick from one of those sound slumbers
which, lasting in reality some half-hour, seem to the sleeper to
have been protracted for three weeks or a month.
The voice had no sooner ceased than the room was shaken
with such violence that the windows rattled in their frames, and
the bedsteads trembled again. Mr. Pickwick started up, and
remained for some minutes fixed in mute astonishment at the
scene before him.
On the floor of the room, a man in a broad-skirted green coat,
with corduroy knee-smalls and gray cotton stockings, was
performing the most popular steps of a hornpipe, with a slang
and burlesque caricature of grace and lightness, which, combined
with the very appropriate character of his costume, was inexpressibly
absurd.
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