Pickwick Abroad: A Companion to the Pickwick Papers — page 247: what you’re looking at

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A NOVEL WITHOUT A HERO. ** Look at him, isn’t he handsome enough to dine any where, Miss Sharp?” On which, of course, Miss Sharp looked at her friend, and they both set off in a fit of laughter, highly agreeable to the old gen- tleman. ‘¢ Did you ever see a pair of buckskins like those, at Miss Pinkerton’s?” continued he, following up his advantage. ‘¢Gracious heavens! Father,’’ cried Jo- seph. ‘There now, I have hurt his feelings. Mrs. Sedley, my dear, I have hurt your son’s feelings. I have alluded to his buck- skins. Ask Miss Sharpif I haven’t? Come, Joseph, be friends with Miss Sharp, and let us all go to dinner.” ‘‘'There’s a pillau, Joseph, just as you like it, and papa has brought home the best turbot in Billingsgate.”’ ‘¢Come, come, sir, walk down stairs with Miss Sharp, and I will follow with these two young women,” said the father, and he took an arm of wife and daughter and walked merrily off. If Miss Rebecca Sharp had determined in her heart upon making the conquest of this big beau, I don’t think, ladies, we have any right to blame her; for though the task of husband-hunting is generally, and with becoming modesty, intrusted by young per- sons. to their mammas, recollect that Miss Sharp had no kind parent to arrange these delicate matters for her, and that if she did not get a husband for herself, there was no one else in the wide world who would take the trouble off her hands. What causes young people to ‘‘come out,” but the noble ambition of matrimony? What sends them trooping to watering-places? What keeps them dancing till five o’clock in the morning through a whole mortal season? What causes them to labor at piano-forte sonatas, and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a guinea a lesson, and to play the harp if they have handsome arms and neat elbows, and to wear Lincoln Green toxo- pholite hats and feathers, but that they may bring down some * desirable” young man with those killing bows and arrows of theirs ? W hat causes respectable parents to take up their carpets, set their houses topsy-turvy, and spend a fifth of their year’s income in ball suppers and iced champagne? Is it sheer love of their species, and an unadul- terated wish to see young people happy and dancing? Psha! they want to marry their daughters; and, as honest Mrs. Sedley has, in the depths of her kind heart, already arranged a score of little schemes for the settlement of her Amelia, so also had our beloved but unprotected Rebecca, deter- mined to do her very best to secure the husband, who was even more necessary for her than for her friend. She had a vivid 17 imagination; she had, besides, read the ‘Arabian Nights” and ‘‘ Guthrie’s Geogra- phy,” and it is a fact, that while she was dressing for dinner, and after she had asked Amelia whether her brother was very rich, she had built for herself a most magnificent castle in the air, of which she was mistress, with a husband somewhere in the back- ground (she had not seen him as yet, and his figure would not therefore be very dis- tinct) ; she had arrayed herself in an infinity of shawls, turbans, and diamond necklaces, and had mounted upon an elephant to the sound of the march in Bluebeard, in order to pay a visit of ceremony to the Grand Mogul. Charming Alnaschar visions! it is the happy privilege of youth to construct you, and many a fanciful young creature besides Re- becca Sharp, has indulged in these delight- ful day-dreams ere now! Joseph Sedley was twelve years older than his sister Amelia. He was in the East India Company’s Civil Service, and his name appeared, at the period of which we write, in the Bengal division of the East India Register, as collector of Boggley Wollah, an honorable and lucrative post, as every body knows: in order to know to what higher posts Joseph rose in the service, the reader is referred to the same periodical. Boggley Wollah is situated in a fine, lonely, marshy, jungly district, famous for snipe- shooting, and where not unfrequently you may flusha tiger. Ramgunge, where there is a magistrate, is only forty miles off, and there is a cavalry station about thirty miles farther ; so Joseph wrote home to his pa- rents, when he took possession of his col- lectorship. He had lived for about eight years of his life, quite alone, at this charm- ing place, scarcely seeing a Christian face, except twice a year, when the detachment arrived to carry off the revenues which he had collected, to Calcutta. ' Luckily, at this time he caught a liver complaint, for the cure of which he returned to Europe, and which was the source of great comfort and amusement to him in his native country. He did not live with his family while in London, but had lodgings of | his own, like a gay young bachelor. Before he went to India he was too young to par- take of the delightful pleasures of a man about town, and plunged inte them, on his return, with considerable assiduity. drove his horses in the park; he dined at the fashionable taverns (for the Oriental Club was not as yet invented); he fre- quented the theaters, as the mode ws in those days, or made his appearance at he opera, laboriously attired in tights ._d a cocked hat. On returning to India, and ever after, he used to talk of the pleasure of this period of his existence with great enthusiasm, and give you to understand that he and Brum- He: CONIC OOO S (SO) mn