How he drank out of different folks’s glasses, and ate of different individuals’s bread, how he frightened into screaming convulsions a bit of boy who was sitting as much as supper in a high chair, by sinking beneath the table and suddenly reappearing with a mask on; how the hostess was really shocked that anybody may discover a pleasure in tormenting kids, and the way the host frowned on the hostess, and felt convinced that Mr. Griggins had performed it with the perfect intentions; how Mr. Griggins defined, and how everybody’s good-humour was restored however the kid’s;-to inform these and 100 different issues ever so briefly, would occupy more of our room and our readers’ patience, than either they or we will conveniently spare. This sets people about considering what on earth the censorious younger gentleman means, and they speedily arrive at the conclusion that he means something very deep indeed; for they motive in this manner-‘This younger gentleman appears so very understanding that he should mean one thing, and as I’m by no means a dull particular person, what a very deep meaning he will need to have if I am unable to find it out! We arrived on the place of rendezvous at the appointed time, and located the glass coaches and the little boys fairly prepared, and divers young ladies and young gentlemen trying anxiously over the breakfast-parlour blinds, who appeared not at all so much gratified by our approach as we may need anticipated, but evidently wished we had been someone else.
The tea-issues having been eliminated, all of us sat down to a spherical recreation, and right here Mr. Griggins shone forth with peculiar brilliancy, abstracting other folks’s fish, and looking over their arms in probably the most comical method. But I had not planned on having fun and forgot about drinking too much. Not having the happiness to know Griggins, we grew to become extraordinarily desirous to see so nice a fellow, the more especially as a stout gentleman with a powdered head, who was sitting with his breeches buckles almost touching the hob, whispered us he was a wit of the first water, when the door opened, and Mr. Griggins being announced, introduced himself, amidst one other shout of laughter and a loud clapping of palms from the younger branches. The door opens at this point of the disclosure, and who of all folks alive walks into the room, but the very Mr. Fairfax, who has been the subject of dialog! Finally, after half a tumblerful of warm sherry and water, he gallantly places on his goloshes over his slippers, and telling Miss Thompson’s servant to run on first and get the door open, escorts that younger lady to her house, five doorways off: the Miss Greys who dwell in the next house but one stopping to peep with merry faces from their very own door till he comes back once more, once they name out ‘Very properly, Mr. Felix,’ and trip into the passage with a chortle more musical than any flute that was ever performed.
The censorious young gentleman has the fame among his familiars of a remarkably clever person, which he maintains by receiving all intelligence and expressing all opinions with a dubious sneer, accompanied with a half smile, expressive of something you please however good-humour. Young ladies mildly call him a ‘sarcastic’ younger gentleman, or a ‘extreme’ younger gentleman. We, who know higher, beg to acquaint them with the actual fact, that he’s merely a censorious young gentleman, and nothing else. I ask.’ ‘I assumed I had completed so,’ rejoins the poor lady, much perplexed; ‘I didn’t observe it very carefully perhaps.’ ‘Oh, not very closely,’ rejoins the censorious young gentleman, triumphantly. As young ladies are generally-not curious, but laudably desirous to accumulate info, the censorious younger gentleman is much talked about among them, and lots of surmises are hazarded relating to him. When the spherical game and several games at blind man’s buff which followed it had been all over, and we were going down to supper, the inexhaustible Mr. Griggins produced a small sprig of mistletoe from his waistcoat pocket, and commenced a common kissing of the assembled females, which occasioned nice commotion and far excitement.