“He drove up to my door in a dashing gig, sir,” answered Mr. Fopperton, “leapt down, rushed in, and enquired if his friend the Archbishop of Canterbury had been waiting there for him? I assured him that his Grace had not visited the shop, to my knowledge, in all his life. ‘God bless me!’ exclaimed Mr. Curtis; ‘I must have made a mistake, then! But don’t you make the leather breeches which his Grace wears when he goes out hunting?’ I replied that I never made leather breeches at all. ‘Nor galligaskins?’ said Mr. Curtis. ‘Nor galligaskins, sir,’ I said. ‘Then blow me tight’ says he, ‘I have come to the wrong shop. My intimate and particular friend the Archbishop of York——’. I suggested ‘Canterbury,’—‘Canterbury I meant!’ exclaimed Mr. Curtis: ‘his Grace promised to introduce me to his own tailor; and here have I been promising introductions likewise to Lord Pumpleby and the Marquis of Dublin, and a whole lot of my fashionable friends. There is a perfect rage all on a sudden to employ his Grace’s tailor!’—I was struck by all this fine-sounding talk, and handed Mr. Curtis my card. ‘Egad!’ said he, laughing, ‘I’ve a precious good mind to have a lark, and pit you against his Grace’s tailor. My eyes! what fun it would be!’”
“And it ended by the Insolvent actually putting you in competition with the imaginary tailor which he had conjured up?” enquired Mr. Bulliwell.
“Just so, sir,” returned Mr. Fopperton “and though I heard sometime afterwards that Mr. Curtis received a handsome income from his uncle Sir Christopher Blunt, yet I never got a sixpence.”
“Be Jasus! Sir Christopher-r is a regular ould screw!” ejaculated Captain O’Blunderbuss.
“Eh?—what?” cried the Commissioners, the one awaking from his nap and the other from his obliviousness.
“Is it afther distur-r-bing ye I’ve been again?” demanded the gallant gentleman: “then, be the holy poker-r! I ask your pardon—and I’ll hould my pace!”
With these words the captain put his arms akimbo—pursed up his mouth in a most extraordinary fashion—and stood as still as a post and as demure as a methodist parson, to the huge delight of the unwashed audience.
“It appears,” said Mr. Bulliwell, resuming his examination of the opposing creditor, “that the Insolvent obtained clothes to the amount of four hundred pounds, and cash to the amount of a thousand?”
Mr. Fopperton bowed an assent.
“And you have every reason to believe that he only talked about the Archbishop’s tailor and his noble acquaintances, in order to throw dust into your eyes?”