‘A woman,’ said I.
‘What might her Christian name be?’ said the jockey.
‘It is not to be mentioned lightly,’ said I, with a sigh.
‘I shouldn’t wonder if it were Isopel,’ said the jockey, with an arch glance of his one brilliant eye.
‘It was Isopel,’ said I. ‘Did you know Isopel Berners?’
‘Ay, and have reason to know her,’ said the jockey, putting his hand into his left waistcoat-pocket, as if to feel for something, ‘for she gave me what I believe few men could do—a most confounded wapping. But now, Mr. Romany Rye, I have again to tell you that I don’t like to be interrupted when I’m speaking, and to add that if you break in upon me a third time, you and I shall quarrel.’
‘Pray proceed with your story,’ said I; ‘I will not interrupt you again.’
‘Good!’ said the jockey. ‘Where was I? Oh, with a set of people who had given up their minds to shortening! Reducing the coin, though rather a lucrative, was a very dangerous, trade. Coin filed felt rough to the touch; coin clipped could be easily detected by the eye; and as for coin reduced by aquafortis, it was generally so discoloured that, unless a great deal of pains was used to polish it, people were apt to stare at it in a strange manner, and to say, “What have they been doing to this here gold?” My grandfather, as I said before, was connected with a gang of shorters, and sometimes shortened money, and at other times passed off what had been shortened by other gentry.
‘Passing off what had been shortened by others was his ruin; for once, in trying to pass off a broad piece which had been laid in aquafortis for four-and-twenty hours, and was very black, not having been properly rectified, he was stopped and searched, and other reduced coins being found about him and in his lodgings,
he was committed to prison, tried, and executed. He was offered his life, provided he would betray his comrades, but he told the big-wigs, who wanted him to do so, that he would see them farther first, and died at Tyburn, amidst the cheers of the populace, leaving my grandmother and father, to whom he had always been a kind husband and parent—for, setting aside the crime for which he suffered, he was a moral man—leaving them, I say, to bewail his irreparable loss.