CHAPTER XLV.
Inn at Beth Gelert--Delectable Company--Lieutenant P---.
The inn or hotel at Beth Gelert was a large and commodious building, and was anything but thronged with company; what company, however, there was, was disagreeable enough, perhaps more so than that in which I had been the preceding evening, which was composed of the scum of Manchester and Liverpool; the company amongst which I now was, consisted of seven or eight individuals, two of them were military puppies, one a tallish fellow, who though evidently upwards of thirty, affected the airs of a languishing girl, and would fain have made people believe that he was dying of _ennui_ and lassitude.

The other was a short spuddy fellow, with a broad ugly face and with spectacles on his nose, who talked very consequentially about "the service" and all that, but whose tone of voice was coarse and his manner that of an under-bred person; then there was an old fellow about sixty-five, a civilian, with a red carbuncled face; he was father of the spuddy military puppy, on whom he occasionally cast eyes of pride and almost adoration, and whose sayings he much applauded, especially certain _doubles entendres_, to call them by no harsher term, directed to a fat girl, weighing some fifteen stone, who officiated in the coffee-room as waiter.

Then there was a creature to do justice to whose appearance would require the pencil of a Hogarth.

He was about five feet three inches and a quarter high, and might have weighed, always provided a stone weight had been attached to him, about half as much as the fat girl.

His countenance was cadaverous and was eternally agitated by something between a grin and a simper.