Cannikin. Jest did, then. Great day for the brewery. Not a ’oss that drawed the Duke as isn’t twenty pound the better for it. Fetch it at the ’ammer.
Tickle. No doubt. More than that if advertised: “Warranted to carry twenty stone; quiet in harness; and never shied at the Duke of Wellington.”
Cannikin. And didn’t the ’osses—the whole team on ’em—look a credit to their grains? All on ’em—with laurel in their heads?
Nutts. Considering where they come from, wouldn’t hops have been properer? Well, and when the people saw the statue, how did they take it?
Cannikin. They opened their mouths, and hooraed as if they would ha’ swallowed it. If instead o’ bright brass it had been made o’ gilt gingerbread, and the mob had been schoolboys, they couldn’t ha’ shouted and smacked their lips more.
Tickle. Well, I don’t wonder—it did somehow look good to eat. It hadn’t so much a goolden as a custard look about it; seemed to my eye as if it had been smeared with yolk o’ eggs. But go on; tell Nutts, Mr Cannikin.
Cannikin. When we’d got the Dook well on the dray, off we went—the ’osses mindin’ it no more than if they’d drawn dooks, instead of beer, all their life. Off we went—and very grand it was. Yet, somehow, when I looked at the cocked-hat—for I’d never seen a cocked-hat in brass afore—I knew it was wrong, but I couldn’t help thinking o’ the Fifth of November. And then the brass cock’s feathers in the hat—didn’t they rattle a bit?
Nutts. Rattle! What, was they loose?
Nosebag. What they’d call in the playhouse, property feathers—made o’ hammered metal. For my part, I should ha’ thought they’d been cast solid.
Tickle. Bless you! Mr Wyatt knows what he’s about. He made ’em to rattle in the wind a-purpose to frighten the birds, and preserve the Duke’s face, otherwise it was feared the swallows might build their nests under his Grace’s eyebrows.