In Which Mr Headstone Is Somewhat Premature In His Celebrations

Next to Christmas Day, the most pleasant annual epoch in existence is the advent of the New Year. There are a lachrymose set of people who usher in the New Year with watching and fasting, as if they were bound to attend as chief mourners at the obsequies of the old one. Mr Headstone is not one of these people, but is of the belief that it is a great deal more complimentary to see the old fellow out, and the new one in, with gaiety and glee. And so Mr Headstone is bound for a quadrille party in a grand house situated on the grand corner of a grand thoroughfare outside of which there is a grand confusion of hackney coaches and carriages. Mr Headstone arrives in a cab in a pair of boots with black cloth fronts, and brings his shoes in his coat-pocket, which shoes he is at this very moment putting on in the hall. Now he is announced by the man in the passage to another man in a blue coat, who signals to a man on the first landing to take Mr Headstone into his care.

The man on the first landing precedes the pedagogue to the drawing-room door and announces him again in a grand voice. Mr Headstone rubs his hands very hard, and smiles as if it were all capital fun, and keeps constantly bowing and turning himself round as he is introduced to the grand company. He glides into a chair at the corner of the sofa, and opens a miscellaneous conversation with the young ladies upon the weather, and the theatres, and the old year, and the last new murder, and the balloon, and the ladies' sleeves, and the festivities of the season, and a great many other topics of small talk.

At supper, Mr. Headstone shows to still greater advantage and is so droll, insisting on all the young ladies having their glasses filled, notwithstanding their repeated assurances that they never can, by any possibility, think of emptying them. After the toast has been drunk, and when the ladies have retired, Mr. Headstone requests that every gentleman will do him the favour of filling his glass, for he has a toast to propose: on which all the gentlemen cry 'Hear! hear!' and pass the decanters accordingly; and Mr. Headstone being informed by the master of the house that they are all charged, and waiting for his toast, rises, and proposes a toast to the New Year and all the good fortune that it will bring upon the present company. The toast is drunk with acclamation and the whole party rejoin the ladies in the drawing-room just as the first stroke of twelve peals from the neighbouring churches rings through the frosty air. And with each subsequent stroke the sound resolves itself into something more like a knock, and Mr Headstone is woken from his dream to find that Mr Guppy and Mr Snodgrass are at the door of his lodgings, and expect the pleasure of his company on this final night of the year at The Saracen’s Head.