“No—no!” was chorused; and, the glasses being filled, Jonathan Chunt proposed a toast which was drunk with acclamation, and the landlord’s toast was:
“Gentlemen, here’s to happier times!”
End of Book I.
After Twenty Years.
“You dog! you confounded lubber! Drive on, or you’ll have them out of sight!” shouted a frank, opened-faced young fellow of some three or four and twenty, as he leaned out of the front window of a post-chaise, and urged his post-boy to increase of speed.
“An’ how can I get another mile an hour out on such bastes, yer honner?” said the post-boy in answer. “The crayture I’m riding takes no more heed of the spur than the grate baste the levvyathan of Howly Scripture; and as to the blind mare there, the more I larrup her the more she hangs back out ov the collar.”
“Gammon!—nonsense!” cried the young man: “you can catch them if you like.”
“Shure, sor, I’d catch ’em if it was me. The spirit of me’s been close alongside this last quarter of an hour; but the bastes here ’ave got skins like a rhinosros.”
“Half a guinea if you catch them and go by in the next two miles,” shouted the traveller.