be cool, you fool! None of your crowing, old cock! Don’t frown so—don’t! Don’t hollo, nor howl, nor growl, nor bow-wow-wow! Good Lord, John, how you do look! Told you so, you know—but stop rolling your goose of an old poll about so, and go and drown your sorrows in a bowl!”
Exhausted, very naturally, by so stupendous an effort, the great Touch-and-go could attend to nothing farther that night. Firmly, composedly, yet with an air of conscious power, he handed his MS. to the devil in waiting, and then, walking leisurely home, retired, with ineffable dignity, to bed.
Meantime the devil to whom the copy was entrusted, ran up stairs to his “case,” in an unutterable hurry, and forthwith made a commencement at “setting” the MS. “up.”
In the first place, of course,—as the opening word was “So”—he made a plunge into the capital S hole and came out in triumph with a capital S. Elated by this success, he immediately threw himself upon the little-o box with a blindfold impetuosity—but who shall describe his horror when his fingers came up without the anticipated letter in their clutch? who shall paint his astonishment and rage at perceiving, as he rubbed his knuckles, that he had been only thumping them to no purpose, against the bottom of an empty box. Not a single little-o was in the little-o hole; and, glancing fearfully at the capital-O partition, he found that, to his extreme terror, in a precisely similar predicament. Awe-stricken, his first impulse was to rush to the foreman.
“Sir!” said he, gasping for breath, “I can’t never set up nothing without no o’s.”
“What do you mean by that?” growled the foreman, who was in a very ill-humor at being kept up so late.
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