“You remember Tom Martin, Neddy? Bless my dear eyes,” said Mr. Roker, shaking his head slowly from side to side, and gazing abstractedly out of the grated window before him, as if he were fondly recalling some peaceful scene of his early youth; “it seems but yesterday that he whopped the coal-heaver down Fox-under-the-hill, by the wharf there. I think I can see him now, a-coming up the Strand between the two street-keepers, a little sobered by his bruising, with a patch o’ winegar and brown paper over his right eyelid, and that ’ere lovely bull-dog, as pinned the little boy arterwards, a-following at his heels. What a rum thing Time is, ain’t it, Neddy?”
Charles Dickens (Pickwick Papers).
Mr. Roker is a turnkey in the Fleet prison.
THE COURTIN’
God makes sech nights, all white an’ still
Fur’z you can look or listen,
Moonshine an’ snow on field an’ hill,