Metropolitan Improved Hot Muffin and Crumpet Baking and Punctual
Delivery Company, capital five millions, in five hundred thousand shares
of ten pounds each; which sums were duly set forth in fat black figures
of considerable size. Mr Bonney elbowed his way briskly upstairs,
receiving in his progress many low bows from the waiters who stood on
the landings to show the way; and, followed by Mr Nickleby, dived into a
suite of apartments behind the great public room: in the second of which
was a business-looking table, and several business-looking people.

'Hear!' cried a gentleman with a double chin, as Mr Bonney presented
himself. 'Chair, gentlemen, chair!'

The new-comers were received with universal approbation, and Mr Bonney
bustled up to the top of the table, took off his hat, ran his fingers
through his hair, and knocked a hackney-coachman's knock on the table
with a little hammer: whereat several gentlemen cried 'Hear!' and nodded
slightly to each other, as much as to say what spirited conduct that
was. Just at this moment, a waiter, feverish with agitation, tore into
the room, and throwing the door open with a crash, shouted 'Sir Matthew
Pupker!'

The committee stood up and clapped their hands for joy, and while they
were clapping them, in came Sir Matthew Pupker, attended by two live
members of Parliament, one Irish and one Scotch, all smiling and bowing,
and looking so pleasant that it seemed a perfect marvel how any
man could have the heart to vote against them. Sir Matthew Pupker
especially, who had a little round head with a flaxen wig on the top
of it, fell into such a paroxysm of bows, that the wig threatened to
be jerked off, every instant. When these symptoms had in some degree
subsided, the gentlemen who were on speaking terms with Sir Matthew
Pupker, or the two other members, crowded round them in three little
groups, near one or other of which the gentlemen who were NOT on
speaking terms with Sir Matthew Pupker or the two other members, stood
lingering, and smiling, and rubbing their hands, in the desperate hope
of something turning up which might bring them into notice. All this
time, Sir Matthew Pupker and the two other members were relating to
their separate circles what the intentions of government were, about
taking up the bill; with a full account of what the government had said
in a whisper the last time they dined with it, and how the government
had been observed to wink when it said so; from