All this time, mark you, he had the whim with him in the dock, and to look at it now and then seemed his only comfort in life,—how it whisked and frisked, and looked about it, and fed heartily, as if there had been no such thing as law or law-cats in the blessed world; and when Tony went back, like a volume of felony, to be bound in stone, the whim still went with him to his cell, and from his cell to the press-room, and from the press-room to the debtor’s door, and from the debtor’s door to death’s door itself, which opens on the scaffold, as you turn off to the right hand or the left, in your way to nobody knows where. To take such a whim of a reptile with one to the gallows, seems whimsical enough; but the Emperor Adrian, if you read the classics, had such a vagabondish, blandish, little animal, his animula vagula blandula, to be with him on his death-bed.
Well, Friday came, and Saturday, and Sunday, and Sunday’s night; he was posting to eternity with four bolters. I will bet the whole national debt he would have given eighteen-pence a mile, and half-a-crown to the boy, to have been posting on any other road. All the favour the law allowed him was to have an Ordinary at eight instead of an ordinary at one, a very ordinary favour to a man who was about to leave off dining. But the devil ought to have his due, and so should the Lord Mayor and the Sheriffs. As they had neglected Tony a little, by not being with the other gossips at his christening, to usher him into this world, they attended very ceremoniously to show him out of it, each in his gilt coach; and, with regard to the coachmen, the footmen, and even the very horses themselves, they were all Malthusians. Of course the Recorder brought the hanging-warrant, and if you would know what the hanging-warrant was like, it was like a map of Cheshire with the Mersey left out.
I forgot to tell you, that before it came to this pass, the Ordinary came oftentimes to the cell where Tony was, to pray, besides whom there was an Extraordinary, who examined him on his points of faith. And the points of faith were these; namely, whether he believed the moon to be of green cheese, and as to the size of the mites thereon. Secondly, if he believed the puppet-play of Punch and Judy to be a type of the fall of Nineveh; and, thirdly, concerning the lions in Pilgrim’s Progress, whether they were bred at Mr. Wombwell’s or Mr. Cross’s, or at the Tower of London. To all of which Tony giving decidedly serious answers, he was pronounced fit to die, and quite prepared to have his neck stretched, as long as the throttle of a claret-bottle when the wine is ropy.
Accordingly, on the morning of Monday, Time laid his long hand upon Tony’s collar, and gave him eight distinct hints that his hour was come for being ornithologised by sentence of the great Law Bird, genus Black-cap, into jail bird, genus Wryneck. Never was there such mobbing to see a hanging. Half the Londoners that morning went without their breakfasts to be in time for the Old Bailey. Trot, trot, trot, canter and full gallop; away through Piccadilly; push on there, in the Strand, hey down Holborn Hill, with a yoicks in Cheapside, and a hark forward in Newgate Street, and a tally ho! in West Smithfield. They all meant to be in at the death. Never was there such a race, to see a man whose race was run losing it by a neck. And the order of the running was thus:—The Royal Humane Society got in first at the Drop, and had an excellent front row. The Society for Preventing Cruelty to Animals was a good second; and may I die, if the Law Life Assurance hadn’t the assurance to come third. Next came the Philanthropic Society, with the Society of Good Samaritans barely a length behind; and then the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, neck and neck with the London Benevolent Society; all racing till they panted again, to see Tony put out of breath. You never saw such a chevy! Luckily there was no Anniversary at St. Paul’s, so the Sons of the Clergy cantered in with all the children of all the parishes that had any charity, to see an execution put in for the debt of Nature. Also the Medical Society came to see one die by the New Dropsy; and all the Knights of the Garter, with their orders, it being a collar-day, wherefore they wore their garters according to the fashion of Miss Bailey; and all the Foreign Ambassadors. Seeing which, Tony put on a good face, and walked stoutly up the ladder, saying softly to himself, “the eyes of Europe are upon you.” All being ready, with the Ordinary on the right hand, and the Extraordinary on the left, and the Great Constrictor a little behind, Tony (who had his whim with him) was asked how he felt himself, and how his father and mother did, and all his little brothers and sisters; to which he answered thankfully, that they were all very well, and that for his own part, he felt very comfortable, and died in the faith of St. Vitus. Now the faith of St. Vitus is not exactly the faith of the Church of England, nor, in faith, do I well know what faith it is; but the Ordinary took no objection to it, for he was a man in favour of universal toleration, remembering the saying of the heathen Priest of Apollo to the Bishop of Magnum Bonum, “You have your thology, and let me have mythology.” So the Ordinary held his peace, but the Extraordinary would fain have argued the point regularly and methodically, according to the dogmatical manner of Cerberus, namely, in a discourse with three heads; and if he had once begun to spin the triple yarn of controversy, prosyversy, and viceversy into a cable, there is no saying on oath whether the other rope might have been used to this day. Seeing, therefore, how matters stood, Master Strangulator pushed in, with an elbowing manner, and began begging pardon of Tony for the part he was about to perform, who forgave him very readily, requesting him moreover to shake hands, and by Gog and Magog, such a shake was never shaked since the Shakers became a sect!
At the first grapple of their fingers, the Strangulator pulled away his hand with a jerk, as if a bear’s palm had been palmed upon him instead of a human paw. Then, after making a frightful face, he gave a mighty great spring or vault upwards, a deal higher than the gallows, when, on coming down, he alighted with his legs a-straddle upon the beam, where he kept posturing for some five minutes; now rowing with his arms and legs, like a fish, now hanging with his head downwards, first by one leg and then by the other, then by one hand, and then again by his chin; you never saw a rope-dancer or tumbler of them all, at Bartlemy’s or Astley’s, more nimble. Then coming down to the stage with a bound, he threw three summersets forward, and then three backwards, as quick as thought. Anon, after standing for a minute in the first position, he fell a-dancing with all his might and main, and as fast as he could lift his feet, like a bear upon a hotted floor. Never was such a spring danced round about the gallows-tree; Gilderoy was a fool to him. You may guess how the Lord Mayor and Sheriffs, and the Ordinary and Extraordinary, stared at such a caper, till their eyes grew as big as owls’; and still more when they saw Tony, after making a round O of his mouth, fall to bouncing and bounding like another Oscar Byrne! Shade of Holbein, what a Dance of Death! Only think of Jack Ketch and the condemned dancing face to face on the drop, now poussetting, now setting to each other, now allemanding, now waltzing, and then, Father of Vestris, what a tableau! Tony figuring, opera-fashion, on one leg, with Cheshire poising on tip-toe on the calf of the other! As for his whim, it was jerked out of the box at the first frisk, and had enough to do, you may be sure, to scuttle out of the way of the skipping and hopping; as it was, the poor reptile got more kicks than ha’pence.
In the meantime the Humanes, and the Samaritans, and the Benevolents, and the rest of the mob, did not stand and look on quite as mum as if it had been an overbrimming Quaker’s meeting, with a collection afterwards at the door for the Deaf and Dumb. They chuckled, and crowed, and laughed till they brayed again; and roared, and bellowed, and shouted, and shrieked like hyænas in hysterics. “Huzza! huzzaw! Go it, Jack! That’s your sort encore—ancore—anker—ancoore,—bravo—brawvo—bravoo—brawvoo! Well done Tony—Tony for ever—Tony for my money!—keep it up! It’s better than dancing upon nothing.” If Laporte had been there, who knows what offer he might have made them; for Taglioni herself never danced so—that is to say, gratis, and without music. On they jigged, however, without let or stint, and may I hang my hat up for ever, if the same whim did not suddenly take the marshal, janitor, or head gaoler, however unfit for dancing, seeing that one of his legs was made of the same flesh as my oak table. Timber or not, he balanced on it for a whole minute, while the other foot’s great toe, far above his hip, pointed exactly at the clock of St. Sepulchre, and then swinging his arms like a horizontal windmill, he spun off into a whirlwind of pirouettes that made one giddy to look at. That done, he struck in between the other two with a real step, and they immediately began to work out a dancing sum in the rule of three, which requires only one figure, namely, a figure of eight. Scuffle, shuffle, in and out, the three Kirk Alloway witches could not have footed it better. In fact, there was no resisting it. The whim took the very Ordinary himself, though less boisterously at first, by reason of the gravity of his calling, wherefore, taking a graceful grip with either hand of his cassock, he only glided off, to begin with, into the minuet de la cour. However, as the dancing grew more fast and furious, he gradually danced, in spite of himself, having been classically bred, into the College Hornpipe, and I defy anyone to say they ever saw it better danced, or more briskly, by the very Doctors of Oxford and Cambridge. Mother of Almack’s, what a quadrille! What a ball! The three Fates, though winders of thread, and spinsters in ordinary, had never seen such a Cotton ball! It was the strangest capriccio, the rarest mad morrice that ever was danced; one minute a mazurka, then a polonaise, then a gallopade, then a fandango, then a bolero, then a saraband, then a guaracha, then a Highland fling! Sometimes the Strangulator, by help of the halter which he waved this way and that, seemed executing the shawl dance; anon, he doubled shuffled like Dusty Bob. One minute Tony appeared as measuring his steps with a duchess dowager of the time of Louis the Fourteenth; the next he was snapping his fingers with Maggie Lauder to the tune of Tullochgorum. You fancied one minute, that the Ordinary was dancing a pas seul, to the music of Haydn’s slow movement, and before you could say Jack Robinson (now Earl of Ripon) he started off into as grotesque a burlesque as ever was flung, and floundered, and flounced, and bounced, and shuffled, and scuffled, and draggled, and wiggle-waggled, shambled, gambolled, scrambled, and skimble-skambled by Grimaldi, in Mother Goose. Blessed were they who were born to behold it, though but from the mother’s arms. It was worth going five miles to see, the first mile trundling a coach-wheel, the second picking up eggs, the third hopping on one leg, the fourth backwards, and the fifth jumped in a sack. If any man think otherwise, may he dance, that is to say, in a ten-acre meadow, with a mohawking bully of a bull for a partner.
A HIGHLAND FLING.
The whim next seized the Extraordinary, and he danced like a dancing Fakir. He jumped, and thumped, and twirled, and whirled, and so did the rest, till the great drops rolled down their foreheads, for it was in the very middle of the dog-days, and verily if Sirius did not become a dancing dog it was not for want of masters. The clock struck nine, and still they were at it, cross hands, down the middle, and back again—’twas a mercy the bolt held. Chassez-croisez, dos-a-dos!—it was getting on for ten, and yet they never called a fresh set! high time, my masters, for authority to interfere; but the Head of the Corporation had no sooner set the foot of the corporation on the scaffold, than the whole of the corporation gave way to the whim, and was carried off with a swagger into the medley, as if it had been the great ball at Easter. There, I say, was the Mayor of London, scarlet cloak, and fur, and gold chain and all, capering like a climbing boy, on the first of May. If you had seen that morris danced, ’tis long odds, Londoners, you would not have known your own May’r from a Hobbyhorse.
The Sheriffs came next, and they gave in to the same whim and danced, and so did three Phrenologists who were in waiting to take a cast of the skull, and another old woman who had got upon the scaffold to be stroked on the neck for a wen. Though her dancing day was over, she hobbled her best, and so did a Jew who came up to haggle for the criminal’s clothes, and likewise an amateur in hangings, who meant to bid high for a piece of the rope. These all danced, and God knows how many more might have joined the corps de ballet, but for a certain leap that was leaped by the Lord Mayor, and which knocked the whim on the head. Now the Lord Mayor’s weight in the City, in mere flesh, was a matter of sixteen stone (on the 10th of November a little more) and his gold chain was seventy-five pounds, as good Troy weight as if Priam had weighed it himself. He had besides in his pocket, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds in gold, ninety-five thousand pounds in silver, and five thousand seven hundred pounds in copper; moreover in his fob was an old family watch, formerly the clock of St. Dunstan, equal to ninety-five pounds and a half. Lastly, he carried on his person a huge bunch of keys, house keys, warehouse keys, shop keys, cellar keys, and particularly wine cellar keys, cupboard keys, and especially pantry keys, and above all the Master Key of the City, which at any old iron shop, would have been reckoned at a hundred pounds. Only think, my masters, when such a corporate body jumped, only think, I say, with what a confounding, astounding, crashing, smashing, flattening, pancake-making sole of a foot it would come down on any reptile short of a crocodile. No wonder, then, that Tony’s whim was completely atomised, obliterated, and annihilated, which it was so utterly, that if you were to search on the gallows to-morrow, with a solar microscope to help you, I don’t believe, on my soul, that you would find the least article or particle of the cuticle of