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Updated: May 29, 2025
I had taken Martha's hand, and was just going to tell her to make preparations to become Mrs Sneezum in a week or two. I let go her hand, and rushed to the door. "What the mischief do you want?" "Why, here's Billy come back again," he said; "won't you come and give a welcome to poor Billy?" "No; I be hang'd if I do.
"Secrets in all families, Sneezum." "Oho! well but the women they're ugly customers, both of them; uncle Sneezum was no judge of beauty." "The women! what do you mean?" said Mr Morgan. "Ay, which of them is it? but you need hardly tell, for I should never know which of them you meant; they're a great deal liker each other than any two peas I ever saw. Are we to call her Mrs Sneezum?"
So I stood very quietly, brooding over my misfortune if a misfortune it was and revenging myself by tearing into a million pieces the beginning and the end of my romantic novel. "Here we are, Sneezum, my boy!" said old Morgan, on the Friday, at about two o'clock; "I've come on before, to tell you to get into good-humour; for perhaps you've forgotten the invitations you gave us all for to-day."
Then poor Martha Brown was too young, and at that time too bashful, for a heroine; and besides, there was no getting over the blot on her birth. Theodore Fitzhedingham could never think of paying attention to the daughter of a Hindoo woman and old Sneezum, the bullock contractor of Bunderjumm.
Many people like those prodigious women of five feet six I'm only five feet five myself, which I believe was the exact measurement of Napoleon; and I must confess that when I looked on Martha Brown that was her name a sort of compliment I always thought to the complexion of her Hindoo mother I could not imagine how she could be the child of such a curious old-fashioned looking individual as I had heard my uncle Sneezum was.
I took the name of Sneezum in addition to my own bought an estate, and an immense number of books and cultivated my land and literature with the greatest care. I planted trees I drained meadows and wrote books. The trees grew the meadows flourished but the books never came to an end. Something always interfered. I never could get the people in my novels disposed of.
"Sneezum, Sneezum!" cried old Morgan, kicking with all his might at the study-door; and interrupting me before I could exactly settle how the sentence was to be properly ended "Come and bid poor Billy good-bye." "Billy? who's Billy?" I thought a little perplexed, perhaps, with the labours of composition.
"Certainly, certainly, Mr Sneezum, but you'll repent of it; and, as to your marrying Martha, you'll just as soon marry the Princess-Royal." When he was gone, I went in search of Martha to settle the matter at once.
"No, no, Mr Sneezum!" exclaimed Mrs Morgan, without looking at me; "leave her alone for a minute or two; it will soon be over." "How do feel, dear?" enquired Miss Letitia. "Are you any better, love?" asked Miss Sophia. And it was very evident they gave themselves no concern about the nearly fatal accident we had met with, which had affected poor Martha so deeply; so I became a little warm.
"Come, come, old Sneezum, don't keep up your anger; recollect you are old enough to be her father, and that she likes you next in the whole world to William. Shake hands with them, and be friends; and if you ever had the folly to think of marrying her, keep your own secret, and nobody will be a bit the wiser."
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