“‘Pon my soul!” he inwardly ejaculated, as he wriggled himself into the seat, and rested his shoulders against the back; “it’s deuced comfortable—just suits me, for all the world, as if it was made to measure! Precious deal better than those d—d “confessionals” that they have now, and that keep you as upright as a ramrod, and shove your knees almost into your mouth; or those cursed Yankee things, that keep you on the wabble like a rocking-horse, and make you look as rickety and short-legged as one of those Italian ‘tombelas.’” “A-ah!” he exclaimed, with great gusto, as he stretched himself far back in his new seat, “there’s nothing like your good old-fashioned arm-chair, after all, with double the regulation allowance of horse-hair.” Then stretching his arms above his head as he yawned, he added, “‘Pon my word, if it wasn’t for the swarms of flies at my bald head, I _do_ think I should drop off to sleep in the chair, for really it is _so_ precious comfortable and I got up _so_ plaguey early, that it’s as much as I can do to keep my eyelids apart. Well, bless me, those Sandboys are long enough pipe-claying their facings; if I’d known only as much, I might have managed to have treated myself to forty winks more this morning, instead of being up with the milk.” “‘Pon my life!” he cried, as he shook himself after the first drowsy nod, “if the ladies are not down soon, they’ll find me driving my pigs to market when they _do_ come;” then, suddenly giving a violent pat on his forehead, that ‘went off’ like a percussion cap, he exclaimed, “D—n the flies, how they do bite;—and I was just dropping off so nicely;—there is no resting for the sharp, needle-like things,—one would fancy my head was a small sugar-cask, from the way in which they dig their proboscises into it. D—n the flies!” he roared again, giving his cranium another and a harder slap; “they’ll pick me to the bone if they go on in this way.” Then, to screen himself from the flies, he seized the red moreen curtain that hung close beside the chair in which he was seated, and withdrawing it from the brass sunflower-like pin, threw it over him, so that his whole body was concealed behind its drapery, and there was no trace of him to be seen, beyond his wooden leg, which struck straight out from the side of the curtain, and had very much the appearance of the handle of the cinder-sifter, as it projects half out of the dust-bin. In a few minutes, what with the warmth of the day, the early rising, and the relief from the fangs of his tiny tormentors, the flies, the Major was dead asleep. It was at this critical point that Mrs. Pilchers descended the stairs to see how the carpenter was proceeding with the transmogrification of the arm-chair, into a nurse’s _ditto_—and as she bobbed her head in at the parlour door, she discovered, to her great surprise, that the room was apparently empty.