brutus. “Oh! is there? I did not see that.”
mephisto. “You are so hasty. The case mayn't be so black as it looks. The others might be thrown in to make up the parcel. Hold the candle nearer.
brutus. “Ay! let us see about the housekeeper.”
The two men read “The Housekeeper” eagerly, but as they read the momentary excitement of hope died out of their faces. Not a sparkle of the ore they sought; all was dross. “The Housekeeper” was one of those who make pickles, not eat them—and in a linen apron a yard wide save their master's money from the fangs of cook and footman, not help him scatter it in a satin gown.
There was not even a stray hint or an indelicate expression for the poor fellow's two shillings. The fraud, was complete. It was not like the ground coffee, pepper and mustard in a London shop—in which there is as often as not a pinch of real coffee, mustard and pepper to a pound of chicory and bullock's blood, of red lead, dirt, flour and turmeric. Here the do was pure.
Then brutus relieved his swelling heart by a string of observations partly rhetorical, partly zoological. He devoted to horrible plagues every square inch of the peddler, enumerating more particularly those interior organs that subserve vitality, and concluded by vowing solemnly to put a knife into him the first fair opportunity. “I'll teach the rogue to—” Sell you medicine for poison, eh?
mephistopheles, either because he was a more philosophic spirit or was not the one out of pocket, took the blow more coolly. “It is a bite and no mistake. But what of it? Our money,” said he, with a touch of sadness, “goes as it comes. This is only two bob flung in the dirt. We should not have invested them in the Three per Cents; and to-night's swag will make it up.”
He then got a fresh wafer and sealed the pamphlets up again. “There,” said he, you keep dark and sell the first flat you come across the same way the varmint sold you.
brutus, sickened at heart by the peddler's iniquity, revived at the prospect of selling some fellow-creature as he had been sold. He put the paper-trap in his pocket; and, cheated of obscenity, consoled himself with brandy such as Bacchus would not own, but Beelzebub would brew for man if permitted to keep an earthly distillery.
Presently they were joined by the third man, and for two hours the three heads might all have been covered by one bushel-basket, and peddler Walker's heartless fraud was forgotten in business of a higher order.