Having come now to the hotel (this by night), where would be a
cheerful fire awaiting us in my comfortable quarters, my uncle
would unstrap my box and dispose its contents in clean and handy
places, urging me the while, like a mother, to make good use of my
opportunity to observe the ways of gentlefolk, especially as
practised in the dining-room of the hotel, that I might expeditiously
master polite manners, which was a thing Skipper Chesterfield held
most seriously in high opinion. I must thus conduct myself (he
said), rather than idly brood, wishing for his company: for a silk
purse was never yet made of a sow's ear but with pain to all
concerned. "An' Dannie," says he, jovially, when he had clapped the
last drawer shut and put my nightclothes to warm at the fire, "if
you was t' tweak that there bell-pull--"