“I do assure you, Mrs. Harris, when I stood in the railways office that morning, with my bundle on my arm, and one patten in my hand, you might have knocked me down with a feather, far less porkmangers which was a lumping against me, continual and sewere all round. I was drove about like a brute animal and almost worritted into fits, when a gentleman with a large shirt-collar, and a hook nose, and a eye like one of Mr. Sweedlepipes’s hawks, and long locks of hair, and wiskers that I wouldn’t have no lady as I was engaged to meet suddenly a turning round a corner, for any sum of money you could offer me, says, laughing, ‘Halloa, Mrs. Gamp, what are you up to?’
“I didn’t know him from a man (except by his clothes); but I says faintly, ‘If you’re a Christian man, show me where to get a second-cladge ticket for Manjester, and have me put in a carriage, or I shall drop.’ Which he kindly did, in a cheerful kind of way, skipping about in the strangest manner as ever I see, making all kinds of actions, and looking and vinking at me from under the brim of his hat (which was a good deal turned up), to that extent, that I should have thought he meant something but for being so flurried as not to have no thoughts at all until I was put in a carriage along with an individgle—the politest as ever I see—in a shepherd’s plaid suit with a long gold watch-guard hanging round his neck, and his hand a trembling through nervousness worse than an aspian leaf. Presently they fell into conversation.
“‘P’raps,’ he says,'if you’re not of the party, you don’t know who it was that assisted you into this carriage!’
“‘No, sir,’ I says, ‘I don’t indeed.’
“‘Why, ma’am,’ he says, a-wisperin, ‘that was George, ma’am.’
“‘What George, sir? I don’t know no George,’ says I.
‘"The great George, ma’am,’ says he. ‘The Crookshanks.’
“‘If you’ll believe me, Mrs. Harris, I turned my head, and see the werry man a-making pictures of me on his thumb nail, at the winder! While another of em—a tall slim, melancholly gent, with dark hair, and a bage vice—looks over his shoulder, with his head o’ one side as if he understood the subject, and cooly says, ‘I’ve draw’d her several times—in Punch,’ he says too I The owdacious wretch.’”
The melancholy gent with the “bage vice” was Leech.
In those days, and down to those days, Cruikshank was convivial—sometimes to excess. It was not for nothing that Maclise had drawn him seated upon a beer barrel.*