“Well,” she said, “if you have never done more than you’ve done since you’ve been here, it’s a wonder the roof’s on! Though what you expected to do, except keep a whole skin, passes me! There’s the Chronicle in today, and such talks of riots at Glasgow and Paisley, and such meetings here and alarms there, it is a wonder to me”—with sarcasm—“they can do without you! To judge by what I hear, Lancashire way is just a kettle of troubles and boiling over, and bread that price everybody is wanting to take the old King’s crown off his head.”
“And his head off his body, ma’am!” Mr. Bishop added solemnly.
“So that it’s little good you and your yeomanry seem to have done at Manchester, except get yourselves abused!”
“Ma’am, the King’s crown is on his head,” Mr. Bishop retorted, “and his head is on his body!”
“Well? Not that his head is much good to him, poor mad gentleman!”
“And King Louis, ma’am, years ago—what of him? The King of France, ma’am? Crown gone, head gone—all gone! And why? Because there was not a good blow struck in time, ma’am! Because, poor, foolish foreigner, he had no yeomanry and no Bow Street, ma’am! But the Government, the British Government, is wiser. They are brave men—brave noblemen, I should say,” Mr. Bishop amended with respect,—“but with treason and misprision of treason stalking the land, with the lower orders, that should behave themselves lowly and reverently to all their betters, turned to ramping, roaring Jacobins seeking whom they may devour, and whose machine they may break, my lords would not sleep in their beds—no, not they, brave men as they are—if it were not for the yeomanry and the runners.” He had to pause for breath.
Mrs. Gilson coughed dryly.
“Leather’s a fine thing,” she said, “if you believe the cobbler.”
“Well,” Mr. Bishop answered, nodding his head confidently, “it’s so far true you’d do ill without it.”
But Mrs. Gilson was equal to the situation.