I AM going, my masters, to tell you a strange romantic, aye, necromantic, sort of story—and yet every monosyllable of it is as true as the Legend of Dumpsius. If you should think otherwise, I cannot help it. All I can say is, you are not experte credo, or expert at believing.
You must know, then, that on a certain day, of a certain year, certain officers went on certain information, to a certain house, in a certain court, in a certain city, to take up a certain Italian for a certain crime. What gross fools are they who say there is nothing certain in this world! However, in they went, with a crash and a dash, and a grip and a grapple, and if they did not take him by the scruff of the neck, like a dog, there is no truth in St. Winifred’s Well. He made no resistance, not so much as a left-hander, though he was by trade a smasher. As for any verbal defence, he never so much as attempted to lay a lie, much less to hatch one. There he was, caught in the very thing, act and fact, as poor a devil as need be to be making money. He was as dead as any die he had about him: as sure of a gallows and a rope, as if he had paid for them down on the nail of before-hand. Oh, ye City Crœsuses, what think ye of a man having his quantum suffocate of twisted hemp for making money! For my own part, if I was to swing for saying so, I’d cry out like a Stentor, that one of God’s images ought not to be made worm’s meat of for only washing the King’s face. ’Twould be a very hard-boiled case, and yet, ’fore Gog and Magog, so it was. For gilding a brass farthing he was to change twelve stone of good human flesh to a clod of clay; to change a jolly, laughing, smiling, grinning, crying, wondering, staring, face-making face for a mere caput mortuum; to change prime tripe, delicate cow-heel, succulent trotters, for a mouthful of dust; to change a garret for a grave; to change a neckcloth for a halter. Zounds! what a deal of change for a bad half sovereign! Well, there he was, caught like a rat, and going for a tit-bit to the furr’d Law-Cats, and without so much as giving a squeak for his life. The counterfeits were on him, so he had nothing to utter. I verily believe, if you had found him in twice as many melting pots, and crucibles, and dies, and white or brown gravy to boot, he could not have coined an excuse. As I said before, he was found with the mould upon him, and that, as the sexton of St. Sepulchre will tell you, is as good as a burial to you any day of your life. He was legally dead, and could not look, like other men, upon the sun as his sun-in-law, so he wisely shook hands with himself, and bade good-bye to himself, and did not attempt with his tongue to lick the cub of guilt into a child of grace. All he asked, was to be allowed to take with him a little reptile, or insect of some sort that he had brought over from Italy, belike to be a solace to his captivity; for Baron Trenck, you know, made a bon-camarade of a prison rat, and Monsieur F., in the Bastile, as you know equally, made a long-standing friend of a daddy-longlegs. We live in a world of whims. We eat them, and drink them, and court them, and marry them, take them to bed and board with us, and why not to prison? So Tonio begged for his whim to keep him company, and as it was a small gentle-looking whim, neither so fierce as a lion, nor so huge as an elephant, and moreover as it was a whim no ways dangerous to Church or State, he was allowed to take it with him in a little box, which he carried in his bosom.
Now, if curiosity should itch to know what his whim was like, let it be known, once for all, that it was like neither a toad, nor a spider, nor a viper, nor a snail, nor a black beetle, nor a newt, but something between the size of a crocodile and a cricket. And as for the manner of its going, it either flew, or swam, or hopped, or crawled, or lay still like an oyster, for the Newgate Calendar does not say which. Why it was not a monkey, or a tortoise, or a marmot, Tonio being an Italian, you must ask of the Foreign Secretary at the Court of the King of the Beggars.
May I transmigrate—when Brahma passes my soul into the parish of St. Brute—may I transmigrate, I say, into a butcher’s daughter’s pet-lamb, if it was not a piteous sight to see Tonio going off between the two law terriers to have an hour’s wearing of that last cravat, which never goes to a laundress, but always hangs upon a line of its own. It must be owned, that he had his whim, but for all the whims that ever were whimmed I wouldn’t have had his crick i’ the neck. Let me, I say, stand on terra firma; I’m content with the look-out I have of life without coveting a bird’s-eye view. Old Haman, when he was forty cubits high, had not a better prospect of this world than I have from the ground floor. Poor Tonio! It was a sorry sight; and if I didn’t pity him, from my soul, may I be an hour behind time for seeing the next hanging bout, and all through getting, by mistake, into a blunderbus. A blunderbus, my masters, is the wrong omnibus.
A LEGAL CONVEYANCE.
Well, law took its course as usual, that is to say, like a greyhound after a hare. Tony was put up, so-ho’d, run after, run over, run before, turned, tumbled and mumbled, scud and scut, and gripped by the jugulars. But that’s a scurvy simile to another I have, lapped up in pancakes, so give the calendar a shove backwards, and suppose it Shrovetide, and poor Tony stuck up in dock by way of a shy-cock for the law limbs to shy at. You never saw such pelting in your life; no, not even when St. Swithin took it into her watery head to rain cats and dogs! First, the Foreman of the Grand Jury jerked a true bill at him, that took effect on his head. Thereupon the Clerk of Arraigns pitched a heavy indictment in his very teeth, so that it shivered into thirteen separate counts. Then the Council for the Crown heaved a brief of forty folios into the pit of his stomach; anon opening a masked battery, he threw in sworn witnesses in a volley like bombshells, and when they exploded there flew out from them two melting pots, four moulds, nine bulls, and seven-and-twenty hogs, and every hog of them weighed in evidence upwards of ninety stone. Finally, the Chief Pitcher himself pitched at him his great wig, and his fur gown, and his gold chain, and his mace, and his great inkstand, and the King’s crown, and the lion and the unicorn, everything in short he could catch up, and then, taking both hands, he heaved at him the Statutes at Large; not content with which he took next to pelt him with pairs of missiles at once. For instance, a horse and a hurdle, a gallows and a halter, a shovel-hat and a condemned sermon, a last dying speech and an elm coffin, and, last of all, may I die of the pip the next time I eat oranges, if he didn’t cast at him the whole steeple of St. Sepulchre, death-bell and all, as if it had been only a snow-ball.
THROWING THE LASSO.
Never was St. Stephen so pelted. No wonder in the world, that under such a huge heap of rubbish, he became utterly dumbfounded, bamboozled, obfuscated, mizmazed, spifflicated, flummockst, and flabbergasted; seeing which the Chief Pitcher, as usual, enquired whether he had the infinitesimal of a word to say against being strangled into a blackamoor, with the very eyes of his head giving notice to quit. What matter that Tony had a bramble in his mind, that bore reasons like blackberries, and ripe ones too; as for example, that a tight rope round the gullet is very bad for the health, and particularly when one’s health requires to take pills, or even boluses, three times a day? I say, he might have given a thousand such reasonable reasons against hanging, but the very momentous minute of opening his mouth, the Chief Pitcher pitched into it a prodigious great bung, as dab and apt and cleverly as if he had played at nothing else but chuck-farthing and pitch-in-the-hole ever since he was fourteen. So the mummy of silence being preserved, the Merlinising began, and hey presto! before you could say Herman Boaz, the big wig was turned into a black cap! After that you may tell the world that our Judges are no conjurors. Thus the trial ended, and Tony’s sentence, as taken in the hieroglyphical short-hand, ran thus: namely, “that he was to be sent on a Black Monday to the Deaf and Dumb School that is kept in a coffin.”