“No, no; oh! I have it, asbestos; well, that’s what I believe the cigars here are made of—they won’t go.”
“There are a good many things here that are no go,” sais Gage, “like Perry’s bills on Coutts; but, Smith, where did you get that flash waistcoat I saw last night?”
“Oh! that was worked by a poor despairing girl at Bath, during a fit of the scarlet fever.”
“It was a memento mori then, I suppose,” replies the other.
But all the talk is not quite so frivolous. Opposite to that large stone edifice, is an old cannon standing on end at the corner of the street, to keep carriages from trespassing on the pavement, and the non-military assemble round it; they are civic great guns. They are discussing the great event of the season—the vote of want of confidence of last night, the resignation of the provincial ministry this morning, and the startling fact that the head upholsterer has been sent for to furnish a new cabinet, that won’t warp with the heat and fly apart. It is very important news; it has been telegraphed to Washington, and was considered so alarming, the President was waked up to be informed of it. He rubbed his eyes and said:
“Well, I acknowledge the coin, you may take my hat. I hope I may be cow-hided if I knew they had a ministry. I thought they only had a governor, and a regiment for a constitution. Will it affect the stocks? How it will scare the Emperor of Rooshia, won’t it?” and he roared so loud he nearly choked. That just shows (everybody regards the speaker with silence, for he is an oracle), says Omniscient Pitt.
That just shows how little the Yankees know and how little the English care about us. “If we want to be indepindent and respictable,” sais an Hibernian magnate, “we must repale the Union.” But what is this? here is a fellow tied hand and foot on a truck, which is conveying him to the police court, swearing and screaming horribly. What is the meaning of all that?
A little cynical old man, commonly called the major, looks knowing, puts on a quizzical expression, and touching his nose with the tip of his finger, says, “One of the new magistrates qualifying as he goes down to be sworn into office.”
It makes the politicians smile, restores their equanimity, and they make room for another committee of safety. A little lower down the street, a mail-coach is starting for Windsor, and ten or fifteen men are assembled doing their utmost, and twenty or thirty boys helping them, to look at the passengers, but are unexpectedly relieved from their arduous duty by a military band at the head of a marching regiment.
Give me the bar though. I don’t mean the bar-room, though there are some capital songs sung, and good stories told, and first-rate rises taken out of green ones, in that bar-room at the big hotel, but I mean the lawyers. They are the merriest and best fellows everywhere. They fight like prize-boxers in public and before all the world, and shake hands when they set to and after it’s over. Preachers, on the contrary, write anonymous letters in newspapers, or let fly pamphlets at each other, and call ugly names. While doctors go from house to house insinuating, undermining, shrugging shoulders, turning up noses, and looking as amazed as when they was fust born into the world, at each other’s prescriptions. Well, politicians are dirty birds too, they get up all sorts of lies against each other, and if any one lays an egg, t’other swears it was stole out of his nest. But lawyers are above all these tricks. As soon as court is ended, off they go arm-in-arm, as if they had both been fighting on one side. “I say, Blowem, that was a capital hit of yours, making old Gurdy swear he was king of the mountains.”