R II
The Squire--The Breakfast

Squire Headlong, in the meanwhile, was quadripartite in his locality;
that is to say, he was superintending the operations in four scenes of
action--namely, the cellar, the library, the picture-gallery, and the
dining-room,--preparing for the reception of his philosophical and
dilettanti visitors. His myrmidon on this occasion was a little
red-nosed butler, whom nature seemed to have cast in the genuine mould
of an antique Silenus, and who waddled about the house after his
master, wiping his forehead and panting for breath, while the latter
bounced from room to room like a cracker, and was indefatigable in his
requisitions for the proximity of his vinous Achates, whose advice and
co-operation he deemed no less necessary in the library than in the
cellar. Multitudes of packages had arrived, by land and water, from
London, and Liverpool, and Chester, and Manchester, and Birmingham,
and various parts of the mountains: books, wine, cheese, globes,
mathematical instruments, turkeys, telescopes, hams, tongues,
microscopes, quadrants, sextants, fiddles, flutes, tea, sugar,
electrical machines, figs, spices, air-pumps, soda-water, chemical
apparatus, eggs, French-horns, drawing books, palettes, oils and
colours, bottled ale and porter, scenery for a private theatre,
pickles and fish-sauce, patent lamps and chandeliers, barrels of
oysters, sofas, chairs, tables, carpets, beds, looking-glasses,
pictures, fruits and confections, nuts, oranges, lemons, packages of
salt salmon, and jars of Portugal grapes. These, arriving with
infinite rapidity, and in inexhaustible succession, had been deposited
at random, as the convenience of the moment dictated,--sofas in the
cellar, chandeliers in the kitchen, hampers of ale in the
drawing-room, and fiddles and fish-sauce in the library. The servants,
unpacking all these in furious haste, and flying with them from place
to place, according to the tumultuous directions of Squire Headlong
and the little fat butler who fumed at his heels, chafed, and crossed,
and clashed, and tumbled over one another up stairs and down. All was
bustle, uproar, and confusion; yet nothing seemed to advance: while
the rage and impetuosity of the Squire continued fermenting to the
highest degree of exasperation, which he signified, from time to time,
by converting some newly unpacked article, such as a book, a bottle, a
ham, or a fiddle, into a missile against the head of some un