Scarcely sooner said than done! Dick came up to the bull as he lay in the pasture, quietly and unsuspectingly chewing the cud, and Dick began to scratch the bull. It need hardly be said that if Dick thought this very funny, the horned beast's thoughts were of another complexion. The bull rose, blurred, and ran bang upon Dick, goring his ribs, throwing him up, and, bounding to the other side of the field, left the scratcher senseless upon the grass, and all before you could have found breath to say, "Jack Robinson!" had you been looking on, like the gamekeeper and farmer and dame Dobson.
Nothing in the wide world could have given the gamekeeper greater pleasure than Dick's overthrow. "Farmer Dobson," said he, "now is the time to nab the rascal: fetch your wheelbarrow, and we'll put him into it, and take him away to the next constable's, and he shall put him into the close-hole, till justice can be had upon him: it will do the Squire's heart good, I'm sure, to learn that we have noosed the Raven at last, after he has noosed so many score brace o' game."
Kiah Dobson's heart felt reluctant to assist in imprisoning Dick, 'scapegrace, although he knew him to be: but how could he refuse compliance with the request of the squire's gamekeeper, for there lay the hares by the poacher's side? Besides, as Kiah often used to say, when he related the story in after years, he reflected that although Dick was so good a logician on the evils of the Game Laws, yet he had become so outrageously daring in bidding defiance to danger, that he feared ill would come on it, if a timely check were not given to his course. So Kiah went and fetched the barrow, and he and the gamekeeper lifted Dick into it, and away they wheeled him to the next constable's house. A surgeon attended to Dick's wounds, when he had brought him to his senses a little; and, the next week, the squire himself, sitting in judicial state at the hall of Manby, committed Dick to the House of Correction for six months.
Dick found the labour of knocking hemp—the usual employ of prisoners in the gaols of North Lincolnshire at that period—to be but pitiful "fun." And when he reflected that he would be likely to come there again, or to some worse place, if he ever afterwards ventured to renew his practice of "snickling" hares, he steadily resolved to "work like his father and his brother Ned," as Farmer Dobson advised. Dick's views on the Game Laws never altered; but he felt, after this sorrowful experience, it would be worse than folly to dream of violating them with impunity, in a country where "the rich all hung together on their own side of the wheat sack," as Kiah Dobson had observed. Now and then, when he happened to have shaken hands too freely with his old acquaintance Sir John Barleycorn, even years after his imprisonment, Raven Dick would be liable to relapse into some shade of his old feeling, and putting on a "gallows-look," as the landlord of the Harrows and Plough, in Froddingham, used to call it, he would threaten to return to his old trade. But there was one saying which, when "passed about" on the long settle of the public-house, was always sure to raise a hearty chorus of laughter at Dick's expense, and to have the effect of dispelling, in a twinkling, all Dick's dreams of having more "fun:" it was—"Who scratched the Bull?"
TIM SWALLOW-WHISTLE, THE TAILOR;
OR,
"EVERY DOG HAS HIS DAY."
Tim Swallow-whistle, the tailor, lived at Horncastle, a thriving little agricultural town in the centre of Lincolnshire, and now well-known even to the verge of Europe for its prodigious yearly horse fair, to which Russ and Pruss, Netherlander and Austrian, Frenchman, Swiss, and Italian, with even, at times, the turban'd Turk, may be beheld flocking to purchase from the rare show of steeds: "but let that pass!" Tim was not one of your fashionable tailors, it is true, but he was reckoned an "uncommon neat hand" at his trade. Indeed, old Cocky Davy, who was a very emperor among the Lincolnshire tailors, always declared Tim to be the cleverest apprentice that ever received his indentures at his hands. Old Cocky—he was so termed on account of the particular loftiness of his carriage—Old Cocky had one especial maxim; it was, "Strike your needle dead, you dog; and make your thread cry 'twang!'"—and no one apprentice that ever sat upon Davy's shop-board so fully gratified his master by the gallant and complete style in which he fulfilled this maxim, as did Tim Swallow-whistle. Cocky Davy was often heard to say—ay, and to swear it too, when in his cups—that it did his heart good to see the masterly manner in which Tim used to strike the cloth. And then, for finishing a button-hole, "Good heavens!"—Cocky Davy would declare in the White Swan parlour, when the clock was on the stroke of twelve—"why, Tim could turn the thing off his fingers with every cast of the thread as regular and exact as if he had worked it by geometry;" and then Cocky would thump his pewter tankard with vehement force upon mine host's white wooden table, and call to have it refilled for the last time that night.
It may easily be guessed that Tim Swallow-whistle was not only a clever hand, but a hard-working lad, while an apprentice, or otherwise he would not have worn such excelling commendations from a master who was quite as frequently found in the parlour of the White Swan as in his own shop, and therefore found it of incalculable value to himself to possess an apprentice who would work hard while his master played. Now, as a loitering apprentice usually makes a worthless, idle man, so a diligent lad is almost invariably found to carry his early habits of industry into mature life, and to make a stirring and prosperous citizen, unless some untoward circumstances arise to bereave him of the power for exertion, or to deprive him of its legitimate and well-deserved fruits.
Tim Swallow-whistle did not belie the promise of his youth. He was full forty years old when the incidents occurred we are about to relate; and up to that time, as he used himself to say, "Nobody could ever say he had an idle bone in his skin." But, let a man be as industrious and well-disposed as he may, ten to one but somebody or other in this crooked world will be found determined to find fault with him. So it was with Tim: he "minded his own business" most emphatically; for he was regularly found on his shop-board every morning, winter or summer, as the clock struck five; and he seldom quitted it before seven at night, unless on some special holiday occasion: he "paid every one their own"—that is to say, he kept no scores, either at the baker's, the butcher's, the grocer's, or at the alehouse: he had a whole coat on his back—though there was, here and there, a patch in it of his own neatest style of repair: and, to conclude the catalogue of his competency in his own language, "he had always something to eat when other folk went to dinner."