“There, Joe, when did you ever look on a hero like that? The bravest heart, the frankest hand, the best judge of a horse, and the handsomest man that ever did honour to Hounslow!”
“For all that,” returned the hostler, shaking his palsied head, and turning back to the tap-room,—“for all that, master, his time be up. Mark my whids, Captain Lovett will not be over the year,—no, nor mayhap the month!”
“Why, you old rascal, what makes you so wise? You will not peach, I suppose!”
“I peach! Devil a bit! But there never was the gemman of the road, great or small, knowing or stupid, as outlived his seventh year. And this will be the captain's seventh, come the 21st of next month; but he be a fine chap, and I'll go to his hanging!”
“Pish!” said the robber, peevishly,—he himself was verging towards the end of his sixth year,—“pish!”
“Mind, I tells it you, master; and somehow or other I thinks—and I has experience in these things—by the fey, of his eye and the drop of his lip, that the captain's time will be up to-day!”
[Fey—A word difficult to translate; but the closest interpretation
of which is, perhaps, “the ill omen.”]
Here the robber lost all patience, and pushing the hoary boder of evil against the wall, he turned on his heel, and sought some more agreeable companion to share his stirrup-cup.
It was in the morning of the day following that in which the above conversations occurred, that the sagacious Augustus Tomlinson and the valorous Edward Pepper, handcuffed and fettered, were jogging along the road in a postchaise, with Mr. Nabbem squeezed in by the side of the former, and two other gentlemen in Mr. Nabbem's confidence mounted on the box of the chaise, and interfering sadly, as Long Ned growlingly remarked, with “the beauty of the prospect.”
“Ah, well!” quoth Nabbem, unavoidably thrusting his elbow into Tomlinson's side, while he drew out his snuffbox, and helped himself largely to the intoxicating dust; “you had best prepare yourself, Mr. Pepper, for a change of prospects. I believes as how there is little to please you in guod [prison].”