"Is it what I would have done with it, your honour asks?" exclaimed Mr. Sullivan, almost choked with rage—"Is it what I would have done with it!—ounly that I'd have dagged it into the heart of 'em at that same time!" As he said this, he threw himself into an attitude of wild desperation, and made a tremendous lunge, as if in the very act of slaughter.
To make short of a long story, he did not find the knife, Mr. Burke barricadoed himself in his room, and Mr. Sullivan turned his wife out of doors.
The magistrate ordered him to find bail to keep the peace towards his wife and all the king's subjects, and told him if his wife was indeed what he had represented her to be, he must seek some less violent mode of separation than the knife.
"WHERE SHALL I SLEEP?"
Henry Walters, a tailor, was brought up from St. Martin's watch-house, to answer the complaint of Mr. Thomas Thompson, who is a tailor too—that is to say, they are two tailors; Mr. Thompson, the master, and Mr. Walters, the man—or, to speak more proverbially, the servant.
Mr. Walters lodges on Mr. Thomas Thompson's premises, near Leicester-square, and at two o'clock in the morning, Mr. Thomas Thompson, being then fast asleep in bed with his wife, was awoke by some person on his side of the bed, leaning over him, and saying—"Be quiet;—can't you?" At the same moment Mrs. Thompson screamed, and said, "Tom Thompson, there's a strange man in the room!"—"What the devil do you want here?" exclaimed Mr. Tom Thompson—valorously jumping out of bed, and seizing the strange man by the collar. To which the strange man replied, by giving Mr. Tom Thompson a thump on the eye, and unseaming his shirt from top to bottom! This was strange treatment in one's own bed-room! But Mr. Tom Thompson kept his hold, Mrs. Thompson alarmed the lodgers, the lodgers called the watch, the watch came (with as much speed as they could,) and when they held their lanterns to the strange man's face—who should it be but this identical Mr. Walters! He had not "a word to throw at a dog," as one of the witnesses shrewdly remarked; and therefore he was at once consigned to the care of the watchman, who bundled him away to the watch-house. Mr. Tom Thompson added, that his wife was so much alarmed at the circumstance, she was quite unable to attend this examination; but that she had told him she was awoke by some one squeezing her hand tenderly, and saying, as aforesaid, "Be quiet—can't you?"
Mr. Walters was now called upon for his defence. But first it may be as well to say something of his person. He was young—say five-and-twenty; short in stature; by no means fat; parenthesis-legged; brush-cropped; nutmeg complexion; unvaccinated; scarlet-trimmed eyes; an Ashantee nose; and a mouth capacious enough to admit the biggest Battersea cabbage that ever was boiled—
"A combination and a form indeed,
Where everything did seem to set its seal,
To give the world assurance of a tailor!"
We have been thus particular in describing the person of Mr. Walters, in order to show that he had no business whatever to be meddling with Mrs. Thompson, or with any other lady.