"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]."
"Nothing makes men so facetious as misfortune to others!" said Augustus, moralizing, and turning himself, as well as he was able, in order to deliver his body from the pointed elbow of Mr. Nabbem. "When a man is down in the world, all the bystanders, very dull fellows before, suddenly become wits!"
"You reflects on I," said Mr. Nabbem. "Well, it does not sinnify a pin; for directly we does our duty, you chaps become howdaciously ungrateful!"
"Ungrateful!" said Pepper; "what a plague have we got to be grateful for? I suppose you think we ought to tell you you are the best friend we have, because you have scrouged us, neck and crop, into this horrible hole, like turkeys fatted for Christmas. 'Sdeath! one's hair is flatted down like a pancake; and as for one's legs, you had better cut them off at once than tuck them up in a place a foot square,—to say nothing of these blackguardly irons!"
"The only irons pardonable in your eyes, Ned," said Tomlinson, "are the curling-irons, eh?"
"Now, if this is not too much!" cried Nabbem, crossly; "you objects to go in a cart like the rest of your profession; and when I puts myself out of the way to obleedgie you with a shay, you slangs I for it!"