By the way, when you go out get me a couple of boxes of sardines, will you, and a dozen twopenny cigars ?" I executed these commissions, and in due time, business being ended, Doubleday and I and Crow, and the sardines and the cigars, started in a body for Cork Place, where, in a first-floor front, the estimable Mr Doubleday was wont to pitch his daily tent.
They were cosy quarters, and contrasted in a marked manner with Beadle Square.

Doubleday knew how to make himself comfortable, evidently.
There were one or two good prints on his walls, a cheerful fire in the hearth, a sofa and an easy-chair, and quite an array of pickle-jars and beer-bottles and jam-pots in his cupboard.

And, to my thinking, who had been used to the plain, unappetising fare of Mrs Nash, the spread on his table was simply sumptuous.
I felt quite shy at being introduced to such an entertainment, and inwardly wondered how long it would be before I, with my eight shillings a week, would be able to afford the like.
We were a little early, and Doubleday therefore pressed us into the service to help him, as he called it, "get all snug and ship-shape," which meant boiling some eggs, emptying the jam-pots into glass dishes, and cutting up a perfect stack of bread.
"Who's coming to-night ?" said Crow, with whom, by the way, I had become speedily reconciled in our mutual occupation.
"Oh, the usual lot," said Doubleday, with the air of a man who gives "feeds" every day of his life.

"The two Wickhams, and Joe Whipcord, and the Field-Marshal, and an Irish fellow who is lodging with him.

We ought to have a jolly evening." In due time the guests arrived, Mr Joseph Whipcord being the earliest.
He was a freckled youth of a most horsey get up, in clothes so tight that it seemed a marvel how he could ever sit down, and a straw in his mouth which appeared to grow there.