“I should say somewhere a little way out of town, and shoot him out o’ the cart into some blessed verdant spot,” replied Bill. “He’s rather a queer one, himself, so he’ll find as he’s all right, when he wakes up and finds as he’s amusing the butterflies and daisies.”
“I’m blessed if you ain’t a out and out good un,” replied the other.
“Supposes then,” suggested Bill, “we takes him up to Hampstead. It’s an odd little out o’ the way place enough.”
“Very good,” said the other. “You are quite sure there’s nobody about?”
“Quite.”
“Come along, then.”
As he spoke the man stooped, and lifted Jacob Gray from the ground with as much ease as if he had been an infant, and followed his comrade down stairs with his burthen, which seemed in no way to distress him.
The court they passed out into was one of those kind which now are exceedingly rare in London, but which the wisdom of our ancestors took good care to make very common and infest the town with. At the period of our tale there was an immense wen, as it might be termed, of various pestiferous courts at the back of the Strand, where thieves and vagabonds of all kinds lived in a sort of community of their own, quite undisturbed by the authorities, who then could boast of very little authority indeed. Another mass of such courts was to be found where Regent-street now stands, and the vicinity; another at the bottom of St. Martin’s-lane, and another close to old Fleet-market, so that the city of London was as well provided with haunts of blackguardism and vice as the mouth of the Thames is with mud banks.
Along the narrow court in which was Bill’s mansion, the confederates pursued their way until they came to what any stranger would have supposed a mere doorway, but which was in reality an entrance to another court; into this they dived, and after proceeding for a small distance ascended a flight of wooden steps, at the bottom of which stood a dirty, mean chaise-cart.
Into this vehicle, without the least ceremony or consideration for what bruises he might receive, Jacob Gray was flung. There was nothing at the bottom of the cart but some littered straw, upon which he laid more like a dead body than anything living and breathing.