As she touched it, the brass nose seemed to elongate, the open mouth
opened still wider, and uttered a roar which made everybody start. The
eyes rolled wildly; the arms and legs uncurled themselves, writhed about,
and seemed to lengthen with each twist; the Knocker expanded into a
figure in yellow livery, six feet high; the screws by which it was fixed
to the door unloosed themselves, and Jenkins Gruffanuff once more trod
the threshold off which he had been lifted more than twenty years ago!
“Master’s not at home,” says Jenkins, just in his old voice; and Mrs.
Jenkins, giving a dreadful _youp_, fell down in a fit, in which nobody
minded her.
For everybody was shouting, “Huzzay! Huzzay!” “Hip, hip, hurray!” “Long
live the King and Queen!”
“Were such things ever seen?” “No, never, never, never!” “The Fairy
Blackstick for ever!”
The bells were ringing double peals, the guns roaring and banging most
prodigiously. Bulbo was embracing everybody; the Lord Chancellor was
flinging up his wig and shouting like a madman; Hedzoff had got the
Archbishop round the waist, and they were dancing a jig for joy; and as
for Giglio, I leave you to imagine what _he_ was doing, and if he kissed
Rosalba once, twice—twenty thousand times, I’m sure I don’t think he was
wrong.
So Gruffanuff opened the hall door with a low bow, just as he had been
accustomed to do, and they all went in and signed the book, and then they
went to church and were married, and the Fairy Blackstick sailed away on
her cane, and was never more heard of in Paflagonia.
AND HERE ENDS THE FIRESIDE PANTOMIME.
End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Junior Classics, Volume 9: Stories
of To-day, by Various
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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