THE PICKWICKIANS BEGIN THEIR ADVENTURES
THEY MEET MR. ALFRED JINGLE, AND WINKLE
IS INVOLVED IN A DUEL

Once upon a time, in London, there was a club called "The Pickwick Club." Mr. Samuel Pickwick, its founder and chairman, was a benevolent, simple-hearted old gentleman of some wealth, with a taste for science. He delighted to invent the most profound theories, to explain the most ordinary happenings and to write long papers to be read before the Club. He had a large bald head, and eyes that twinkled behind round spectacles, and he made a speech with one hand under his coat tails and the other waving in the air.

His fellow members looked upon Mr. Pickwick as a very great man, and when he proposed that he and three others form a "Corresponding Society," which should travel about and forward to the club accounts of their adventures, the idea was at once adopted.

The three that Mr. Pickwick chose were named Tupman, Snodgrass and Winkle. Tupman was middle-aged with a double chin and was so fat[Pg 214] that for years he had not seen the watch chain that crossed his silk waistcoat. But he had a youthful, romantic disposition, and a great liking for the fair sex. Snodgrass, who had no parents, was a ward of Mr. Pickwick\'s and imagined himself a poet. Winkle was a young man whose father had sent him to London to learn life; he wore a green shooting-coat and his great ambition was to be considered a sportsman, though at heart he was afraid of either a horse or a gun. With these three companions Mr. Pickwick prepared to set out in search of adventures.

Next morning as he drove in a cab to the inn where all were to take the coach, Mr. Pickwick began to chat with the driver. The cabman amused himself by telling the most impossible things, all of which Mr. Pickwick believed. When he said his horse was forty-two years old and that he often kept him out three weeks at a time without resting, down it went in Mr. Pickwick\'s note-book as a wonderful instance of the endurance of horses. Unfortunately, however, the driver thought Mr. Pickwick was putting down the number of the cab so as to complain of him, and as they arrived just then at the inn, he jumped from his seat with the intention of fighting his dismayed passenger. He knocked off Mr. Pickwick\'s spectacles and, dancing back and forth as the other\'s three comrades rushed to the rescue, planted a blow in Mr. Snodgrass\'s eye, another in Tupman\'s waistcoat and[Pg 215] ended by knocking all the breath out of Winkle\'s body.

From this dilemma they were rescued by a tall, thin, long-haired, young man in a faded green coat, worn black trousers and patched shoes, who seized Mr. Pickwick and lugged him into the inn by main force, talking with a jaunty independent manner and in rapid and broken sentences:

"This way, sir—where\'s your friends?—all a mistake—never mind—here, waiter—brandy and water—raw beefsteak for the gentleman\'s eye—eh,—ha-ha!"

The seedy-looking stranger, whose name was Alfred Jingle, was a passenger on the same coach that day and entertained the Pickwickians with marvelous stories of his life in Spain. None of these was true, to be sure, but they were all entered in M............