"My friend, Mr. Sawyer," interposed Mr. Pickwick, "your son's friend."
"Oh," said Mr. Winkle the elder, looking rather grimly at Bob. "I hope you are well, sir."
"Right as a trivet, sir," replied Bob Sawyer.
"This other gentleman," cried Mr. Pickwick, "is, as you will see, when you have read the letter with which I am entrusted, a very near relative, or I should rather say a very particular friend of your son's. His name is Allen."
"That gentleman?" inquired Mr. Winkle, pointing with the card towards Ben Allen, who had fallen asleep in an attitude which left nothing of him visible but his spine and his coat collar.
Mr. Pickwick was on the point of replying to the question, and reciting Mr. Benjamin Allen's name and honourable distinctions at full length, when the sprightly Mr. Bob Sawyer, with a view of rousing his friend to a sense of his situation, inflicted a startling pinch upon the fleshy part of his arm, which caused him to jump up with a shriek. Suddenly aware that he was in the presence of a stranger, Mr. Ben Allen advanced, and, shaking Mr. Winkle most affectionately by both hands for about five minutes, murmured, in some halfintelligible fragments of sentences, the great delight he felt in seeing him, and a hospitable inquiry whether he felt disposed to take anything after his walk, or would prefer waiting "till dinner-time;" which done, he sat down and gazed about him with a petrified stare, as if he had not the remotest idea where he was, which indeed he had not.
All this was most embarrassing to Mr. Pickwick, the more especially as Mr. Winkle, senior, evinced palpable astonishment at the eccentric—not to say extraordinary—behaviour of his two companions. To bring the matter to an issue at once, he drew a letter from his pocket, and presenting it to Mr. Winkle, senior, said:
"This letter, sir, is from your son. You will see, by its contents, that on your favourable and fatherly consideration
