"Oh, thank you; yes, any thing. You will find five shillings in my waistcoat-pocket, Robert; please to take it; but I can't eat." "Thank'ee, sir," said the scout, as he abstracted the five shillings; "but you'd better have a bit of somethin', sir; - a cup of strong tea, or somethin'. Mr. Smalls, sir, when he were pleasant, he always had beer, sir; but p'raps you ain't been used to bein' pleasant, sir, and slops might suit you better, sir." "Oh, any thing, any thing!" groaned our poor, unheroic hero, as he turned his face to the wall, and endeavoured to recollect in what way he had been "pleasant" the night before. But, alas! the wells of his memory had, for the time, been poisoned, and nothing clear or pure could be drawn therefrom. So he got up and looked at himself in the glass, and scarcely recognized the tangled-haired, sallow-faced wretch, whose bloodshot eyes gazed heavily at him from the mirror. So he nervously drained the water-bottle, and buried himself once more among the tossed and tumbled bed-clothes. The tea really did him some good, and enabled him to recover sufficient nerve to go feebly through the operation of dressing; though it was lucky that nature had not yet brought Mr. Verdant Green to the necessity of shaving, for the handling of a razor might have been attended with suicidal results, and have brought these veracious memoirs and their hero to an untimely end. He had just sat down to a second edition of tea, and was reading a letter that the post had brought him from his sister Mary, in which she said, "I dare say by this time you have found Mr. Charles Larkyns a very ~delightful~ companion, and I ~am sure~ a very ~valuable~ one; as, from what the rector says, he appears to be so ~steady~, and has such ~nice quiet~ companions:" - our hero had read as far as this, when a great noise just without his door, caused the letter to drop from his trembling hands; and, between loud ~fanfares~ from a post-horn, and heavy thumps upon the oak, a voice was heard, demanding "Entrance in the Proctor's name." [80 ADVENTURES OF MR. VERDANT GREEN] Mr. Verdant Green had for the first time "sported his oak." Under any circumstances it would have been a mere form, since his bashful politeness would have induced him to open it to any comer; but, at the dreaded name of the Proctor, he sprang from his chair, and while impositions, rustications, and expulsions rushed tumultuously through his disordered brain, he nervously undid the springlock, and admitted - not the Proctor, but the "steady" Mr. Charles Larkyns and his "nice quiet companion," little Mr. Bouncer, who testified his joy at the success of their ~coup d'etat~, by blowing on his horn loud blasts that might have been borne by Fontarabian echoes, and which rang through poor Verdant's head with indescribable jarrings. "Well, Verdant," said Charles Larkyns, "how do you find yourself this morning? You look rather shaky."