Twelve thousand odd hundred pounds was Chops’s winnins. He had bought a half-ticket for the twenty-five thousand prize, and it had come up. The first use he made of his property was to offer to fight the Wild Indian for five hundred pound a side, him with a poisoned darnin-needle and the Indian with a club; but the Indian being in want of backers to that amount, it went no further.
Arter he had been mad for a week—in a state of mind, in short, in which, if I had let him sit on the organ for only two minutes, I believe he would have bust—but we kept the organ from him—Mr. Chops come round and behaved liberal and beautiful to all. He then sent for a young man he knowed, as had a wery genteel appearance and was a Bonnet at a gaming-booth (most respectable brought up, father havin been imminent in the livery-stable line, but unfort’nate in a commercial crisis through paintin a old gray, ginger-bay, and sellin him with a pedigree), and Mr. Chops said this to Bonnet, who said his name was Normandy, which it wasn’t:—
“Normandy, I’m going into society. Will you go with me?”
Says Normandy: “Do I understand you, Mr. Chops, to hintimate that the ’ole of the expenses of that move will be borne by yourself?”
“Correct,” says Mr. Chops. “And you shall have a princely allowance too.”
The Bonnet lifted Mr. Chops upon a chair to shake hands with him, and replied in poetry, his eyes seemingly full of tears:—
“My boat is on the shore,
And my bark is on the sea,
And I do not ask for more,
But I’ll go—along with thee.”
They went into society, in a chaise and four grays, with silk jackets. They took lodgings in Pall Mall, London, and they blazed away.
In consequence of a note that was brought to Bartlemy Fair in the autumn of next year by a servant, most wonderful got up in milk-white cords and tops, I cleaned myself and went to Pall Mall, one evening appinted. The gentlemen was at their wine arter dinner, and Mr. Chops’s eyes was more fixed in that Ed of his than I thought good for him. There was three of ’em (in company, I mean), and I knowed the third well. When last met, he had on a white Roman shirt, and a bishop’s mitre covered with leopard-skin, and played the clarionet all wrong, in a band, at a wild-beast show.
This gent took on not to know me, and Mr. Chops said: “Gentlemen, this is an old friend of former days”; and Normandy looked at me through a eyeglass, and said, “Magsman, glad to see ye!” which I’ll take my oath he wasn’t. Mr. Chops, to get him convenient to the table, had his chair on a throne, much of the form of George Fourth’s in the canvas, but he hardly appeared to me to be King there in any other pint of view, for his two gentlemen ordered about like emperors. They was all dressed like May-day—gorgeous!—and as to wine, they swam in all sorts.