Mrs Nutts. Don’t you think it, Mr Nutts; for from this blessed minute, knowing what I do know—and I hope all women will follow my example—I’ll never wear nothing but silk.
Slowgoe. Gun-cotton! I don’t believe a word about it. All new-fangled stuff. If we once go to war with gun-cotton, and give up our honest powder—the powder that won a Nile, and Trafalgar, and Waterloo—there’s an end of the British Constitution. They’re going to take the flints out of the muskets, too, and trust to ’cussion-caps. Well, if a war does come, I hope we shan’t see the King o’ the French, not only King of Great Britain, but the Governor of the Bank of England.
Nutts. Wonderful discoveries, certainly! We make gunpowder of cotton to make wounds with, and lint out of linen to cure ’em.
Peabody. I wonder what Friar Bacon would say if he knew it. Friar Bacon, Mr Nosebag, was a parson, and invented gunpowder. You knew that, I suppose?
Nosebag. No, I didn’t; but from some parsons I’ve heard and read about, I can quite believe it.
Slowgoe. Well, my ’pinion is, if Friar Bacon was to hear of this gun-cotton, as you call it, he’d treat it with the contempt it deserves. I say again, I don’t believe it.
Nutts. Suppose you was blown up to the Monument by it?
Slowgoe. Well, I hate a man who doesn’t stick to his principles—I wouldn’t believe it then.
Nutts. Ha! Mr Slowgoe, don’t you in that manner fly in the face of fortin and your washer-woman. At this very moment, I look upon it, every man’s life is in the hands of his clear-starcher; for who knows what they’ll make starch of now? and then for gowns and petticoats, and——
Mrs Nutts. There; hold your tongue, Mr Nutts. I’ll be on my guard, I assure you. You don’t get rid of me like the poor woman at the Surr’y, I can tell you. For if the gun-cotton only wants a good pressing to go off, I won’t wear a blessed stitch that I don’t first see well mangled.