Mrs. Flumgarten's unruly member was about to pour upon the master-mason a flood of Fubsyean eloquence, when Prudence, the family guardian angel, took her by the tongue's tip, as St. Dunstan took a certain ebony gentleman by the nose. She telegraphed Mrs. Muff, and Mrs. Muff telegraphed the intelligent Guy. Just as Brutus was fetching breath for another ebullition, with his hand on the decanter for another bumper, he found himself half throttled in the Cornish hug of his affectionate and blubbering first-born! When a chimney caught fire, it was a custom in Merrie England to drop down it a live goose, in the quality of extinguisher! And no goose ever performed its office better than the living Guy. He opened the flood-gates of his gooseberry eyes, and played upon pa so effectually, that Mr. Muff's ire or fire was speedily put out; and when, to prevent a coroner's inquest, the obedient child was motioned by the ladies to relax his filial embrace, the mollified master-mason began to sigh and sob too. The politic sisters now proposed to cut short their day's pleasure!—Uncle Timothy, to whom it was some consolation, that while he had been sitting upon thorns, his tormentors too were a little nettled, seeing bluff John Tomkins in the stable-yard grooming con amore one of Mr. Bosky's pet bloods, called out, “John! Tm afraid we were too many this morning for that shying left-wheeler. Now, if he should take to kicking—”
“Kicking! Mr. Timwiddy!” screamed Mrs. Flumgarten.
“Kicking! Mr. Timwig!” echoed Mrs. Muff.
Herodotus (who practised what he preached) said, “When telling a lie will be profitable, let it be told!”—“He may lie,” said Plato, “who knows how to do it in a suitable time.” So thought John Tomkins! who hoping to frighten his unwelcome customers into an omnibus, and drive home Uncle Timothy in capital style, so aggravated the possible kickings, plungings, takings fright, and runnings away of that terrible left-wheeler, that the accommodating middle-aged gentleman was easily persuaded by the ladies to lighten the weight and diminish the danger, by returning to town by some other conveyance. And it was highly entertaining to mark the glum looks of John when he doggedly put the horses to, and how he mischievously laid his whipcord into the sensitive flanks of the “shying left-wheeler,” that honoured every draft on his fetlocks, and confirmed the terrifying anticipations and multiplications of the veracious John Tomkins!
“Song sweetens toil, however rude the sound,”—and John sweetened his by humming the following, in which he encored himself several times, as he drove Mrs. Flumgarten and family, to town.
Dash along! splash along! hi, gee ho!
Four-and-twenty periwigs all of a row!
Save me from a tough yarn twice over told—
Save me from a Jerry Sneak, and save me from a scold.
A horse is not a mare, and a cow is not a calf;