Tink, tink, tink. The locksmith paused at last, and wiped his brow. The
silence roused the cat, who, jumping softly down, crept to the door,
and watched with tiger eyes a bird-cage in an opposite window. Gabriel
lifted Toby to his mouth, and took a hearty draught.
Then, as he stood upright, with his head flung back, and his portly
chest thrown out, you would have seen that Gabriel's lower man was
clothed in military gear. Glancing at the wall beyond, there might
have been espied, hanging on their several pegs, a cap and feather,
broadsword, sash, and coat of scarlet; which any man learned in such
matters would have known from their make and pattern to be the uniform
of a serjeant in the Royal East London Volunteers.
As the locksmith put his mug down, empty, on the bench whence it had
smiled on him before, he glanced at these articles with a laughing eye,
and looking at them with his head a little on one side, as though he
would get them all into a focus, said, leaning on his hammer:
'Time was, now, I remember, when I was like to run mad with the desire
to wear a coat of that colour. If any one (except my father) had called
me a fool for my pains, how I should have fired and fumed! But what a
fool I must have been, sure-ly!'
'Ah!' sighed Mrs Varden, who had entered unobserved.
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