‘LINES TO A BRASS POT
‘Oh Pott! if you’d known
How false she’d have grown
When you heard the marriage bells tinkle;
You’d have done then, I vow,
What you cannot help now,
And handed her over to W*****’”
“What,” said Mr. Pott, solemnly; “what rhymes to ‘tinkle,’ villain?”
“What rhymes to ‘tinkle’?” said Mrs. Pott, whose entrance at the moment forestalled the reply. “What rhymes to ‘tinkle’? Why ‘Winkle,’ I should conceive:” saying this, Mrs. Pott smiled sweetly on the disturbed Pickwickian, and extended her hand towards him. The agitated young man would have accepted it, in his confusion, had not Pott indignantly interposed.
“Back, ma’am—back!” said the editor. “Take his hand before my very face!”
“Mr. P.!” said his astonished lady.
“Wretched woman, look here,” exclaimed the husband. “Look here, ma’am—‘Lines to a Brass Pot.’ ‘Brass pot;’—that’s me, ma’am. ‘False she’d have grown;’—that’s you, ma’am—you.” With this ebullition of rage, which was not unaccompanied with something like a tremble, at the expression of his wife’s face, Mr. Pott dashed the current number of the Eatanswill Independent at her feet.
“Upon my word, sir!” said the astonished Mrs. Pott, stooping to pick up the paper. “Upon my word, sir!”
Mr. Pott winced beneath the contemptuous gaze of his wife. He had made a desperate struggle to screw up his courage, but it was fast coming unscrewed again.
There appears nothing very tremendous in this little sentence, “Upon my word, sir!” when it comes to be read; but the tone of voice in which it was delivered, and the look that accompanied it, both seeming to bear reference to some revenge to be thereafter visited upon the head of Pott, produced their full effect upon him. The most unskilful observer could have detected in his troubled countenance, a readiness to resign his Wellington boots to any efficient substitute who would have consented to stand in them at that moment.