Mr. Ketch, I say, sat in his lodge, having locked up the cloisters about an hour before, sneezing and wheezing, for he was suffering from a cold, caught the previous day in the wet. He was spelling over a weekly twopenny newspaper, borrowed from the public-house, by the help of a flaring tallow candle, and a pair of spectacles, of which one glass was out. Cynically severe was he over everything he read, as you know it was in the nature of Mr. Ketch to be. As the three-quarters past six chimed out from the cathedral clock, his door was suddenly opened, and a voice called out, “Beer!” Mr. Ketch’s ale had arrived.
But the arrival did not give that gentleman pleasure, and he started up in what, but for the respect we bear him, we might call a fury. Dashing his one-eyed glasses on the table, he attacked the man.
“What d’ye mean with your ‘beer’ at this time o’ night? It wants a quarter to seven! Haven’t you no ears? haven’t you no clock at your place? D’ye think I shall take it in now?”
“Well, it just comes to this,” said the man, who was the brewer at the public-house, and made himself useful at odd jobs in his spare time: “if you don’t like to take it in now, you can’t have it at all, of my bringing. I’m going up to t’other end of the town, and shan’t be back this side of ten.”
Mr. Ketch, with much groaning and grumbling, took the ale and poured it into a jug of his own—a handsome jug, that had been in the wars and lost its spout and handle—giving back the other jug to the man. “You serve me such a imperant trick again, as to bring my ale a quarter of a hour aforehand, that’s all!” snarled he.
The man received the jug, and went off whistling; he had the pleasure of knowing Mr. Ketch and his temper well. That gentleman closed his door with a bang, and proceeded to take out his customary bread and cheese. Not that he had any great love for a bread-and-cheese supper as a matter of fancy: he would very much have preferred something more dainty; only, dainties and Mr. Ketch’s pocket did not agree.
“They want to be took down a notch, that public—sending out a man’s beer a quarter afore seven, when it ain’t ordered to come till seven strikes. Much they care if it stops a waiting and flattening! Be I a slave, that I should be forced to swallow my supper afore I want it, just to please them? They have a sight too much custom, that’s what it is.”
He took a slight draught of the offending ale, and was critically surveying the loaf, before applying to it that green-handled knife of his, whose elegance you have heard of, when a second summons was heard at the door—a very timid one this time.
Mr. Ketch flung down the bread and the knife. “What’s the reason I can’t get a meal in quiet? Who is it?”
There was no response to this, beyond a second faint tapping. “Come in!” roared out he. “Pull the string o’ the latch.”