Mr.Grundy's positive refusal to gratify the company occasioned another silence.

'Won't anybody enliven us ?' said the chairman, despondingly.
'Why don't you enliven us yourself, Mr.Chairman ?' said a young man with a whisker, a squint, and an open shirt collar (dirty), from the bottom of the table.
'Hear! hear!' said the smoking gentleman, in the Mosaic jewellery.
'Because I only know one song, and I have sung it already, and it's a fine of "glasses round" to sing the same song twice in a night,' replied the chairman.
This was an unanswerable reply, and silence prevailed again.
'I have been to-night, gentlemen,' said Mr.Pickwick, hoping to start a subject which all the company could take a part in discussing, 'I have been to-night, in a place which you all know very well, doubtless, but which I have not been in for some years, and know very little of; I mean Gray's Inn, gentlemen.

Curious little nooks in a great place, like London, these old inns are.' 'By Jove!' said the chairman, whispering across the table to Mr.
Pickwick, 'you have hit upon something that one of us, at least, would talk upon for ever.

You'll draw old Jack Bamber out; he was never heard to talk about anything else but the inns, and he has lived alone in them till he's half crazy.' The individual to whom Lowten alluded, was a little, yellow, high-shouldered man, whose countenance, from his habit of stooping forward when silent, Mr.Pickwick had not observed before.

He wondered, though, when the old man raised his shrivelled face, and bent his gray eye upon him, with a keen inquiring look, that such remarkable features could have escaped his attention for a moment.