By the time he had passed through Fleet Street, and had returned along Oxford Street and Holborn, his head was in a whirl. In the course of a few short hours his senses had received more numerous and striking impressions than had been made upon them probably during the whole course of his previous life. London seemed to him a Babel, and himself one of those who were lost utterly in the confusion of tongues,--tongues not of men merely, but of iron and adamant, rattling together their horrible jargon, until his ears sounded and reverberated like two shells beside his head, and his brain became bewildered as if with (that which he had happily never yet experienced) a night's excess.
About seven o'clock in the evening he returned to his inn. Having placed himself quietly in a retired corner of the parlour of the "Yorkshire House," and immediately beneath a sloping skylight extending the whole breadth of the room,--a position which very strongly suggested the idea that he was sitting under a cucumber frame,--Colin amused himself by making silent remarks upon the scene before him. Sundry very miscellaneous-looking personages formed the principal figures of the picture, and were relieved by numerous accessaries of mutton-chops, biscuits, broiled kidneys, pints of stout, and glasses of gin-punch; the whole being enveloped in an atmosphere of such dense smoke, as gave a very shadowy and mysterious character to every object seen through it.
"There's a fly on your nose, Mr. Prince," remarked a lean hungry-looking fellow; "a blue-bottle, sir, just on the end there."
The individual thus addressed was a sinister-looking man, who, it afterwards appeared was a native of Leeds, in which he had formerly carried on business, and contrived to scrape together a large fortune. In mercantile phraseology, he was a "thirty thousand pound man" and, though an ignorant and surly fellow, on account of his property he was looked up to by everybody as ignorant as himself. On hearing his friend Hobson's remark, Mr. Prince suddenly seized the end of his own nose, and grasped it in his hand, as he was in the regular habit of doing whenever the fly was mentioned, while with a very shallow assumption of facetiousness he replied, "Then I 've got him to-night, by Go'!"