"What did you say?" asked the Beau.
"I said I would gladly cut the claws of every harpy on the transport," answered the sailor.
"Well, so you may, sir," said Mr. Ripple, "but by Heaven! you shan't do so here."
Next morning the Captain had his orders and was shot through the heart in the Carthagena business. Poor Captain Lagge, he had a wife and a little maid waiting for him in the prettiest cottage between Pevensey and Brighthelmstone.
Charles passed many others whose small histories, could I recount them, would fill this book to overflowing. For each one he could recall some unsavoury episode, some mean adventure that made its hero contemptible.
"Oddslife," thought Charles, "was ever Society so corrupt, so insincere, so entirely damnable?"
By this time he was back in the High Street after a long circuit, and just as he was thinking of crossing the road to reach the Blue Boar and bed, he noticed a candle was burning in his bookseller's little back parlour.
"I'll inquire after the sale of my poems," he decided, and without more ado hammered loudly on the door of the shop. Presently in answer to his continuous rappings, a foxy-faced old young man with a premature stoop and cloaths both squalid and ill-cut, shuffled through the shop and asked who was there.
"A mendicant poet," cried Charles.
"Be d——d," muttered the foxy-faced man, preparing to go back.