The crowd was now at its thickest. A chariot, with servants in splendid liveries, which I immediately recognized as my own, whirled onward. Julia was seated in it by myself, or the devil in my shape. There I was, perfectly plain to behold. The face, the form were the same, but the dress superlatively exquisite, and beautifully adapted to the figure. The turn-out of Fitzcrocky dashed by at the same time. He glared furiously upon my happy representative. With matchless insinuation this latter ogled and flirted with Julia. She returned his smiles with eyliads of incipient affection. As they passed me by, the fellow who had thus impudently usurped my figure and property winked—yes, he absolutely winked at me. My veins boiled with rage. Shrieking out a fearful oath, I seized a fragment of paving-stone and hurled it frantically at him. A scream, a rush, and I turned and fled, without stopping to ascertain the amount of damage inflicted by my missile, and ran as if the furies had been after me. But I ran not alone. A dense crowd of policemen, servants and gentleman on horseback dashed in pursuit. Never did fugitive from the galleys exert his legs with a better will, or with more effect, than I did. Timor additit alas. On I rushed, amidst the clamor, and dust, and clatter of the yelling multitude, as if the avenger of blood had been behind me. I had been a sportsman, and never did a Leicestershire fox lead a squad of Meltonians such a circumbendibus as I did my pursuers. One by one they gave in—the noise died away gradually, and I was safe.
When partially recovered, I found myself within a queer, dark-looking old court, in the neighborhood of Hertford street and Brick Lane. I was surrounded by a multitude of crazy, loitering, reeking houses, apparently the abodes of no living beings, save Jew clothesmen, oyster venders, pawnbrokers, and gin dealers. A squalid, miserable, broken-down dog-kennel it was too! Tattered children ran about, dabbling in the filthy gutters, indulging in the mockery of play. Rough looking men, wrapped in heavy pea-coats and coarse jackets, with red and bloated faces, lounged about the doors of the various dealers, and haggard, wretched-looking women might have been descried entering the dens of the pawnbrokers, in hopes to raise some pittance of money for the purchase of food or liquor, by pledging paltry articles of dress or furniture. I sat down on the pavement side and stared around me. The scene was altogether dissimilar to any thing I had been in the habit of witnessing, and it was an interesting though a painful novelty. Good God! the misery, and wretchedness, and grinding poverty, deadening to the heart, which exist in large cities, within ken of opulence, of luxury and of splendor! O! could the voice of these wretched throngs be heard, in its collected wailing, what a cry of despairful agony would go up to the throne of the Everlasting! Dead souls in living sepulchres, stalking their gloomy round of poverty, neglect and wo—uneducated, ungodly, famine-stricken—what hope is there for them in this world, and, word of horror, what in the next!
As I sat in revery, some one tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up. A stout, heavily built man, with a pimpled and swollen face, attired in a rough drab over-coat, with leather gaiters and hob-nailed bootees, stood beside me.
“Hollo, gen’l’mn Bill,” quoth this interesting parsonage. “Vy, vot brings you in these parts?”
I knew the fellow at first glance, but, by Jupiter, I had never seen him before.
“Well, old fellow,” said I, with a hilarity that disgusted me, although Heaven knows I couldn’t help it, “what news from your ken?”
“I’tell thee vot,” said Gabriel Sooterkins, for the gentleman was familiarly known by that appellation, “a’ter this night, Billy, my bo, you had better change your tramp. The beaks ’ave nabbed Ikey about that ’ere job on Saffron Hill, and they say he’s peached upon it. Confound the trade, say I, if pals can’t be true to one another.”
I recollected perfectly the matter he alluded to. It was a burglary committed upon an old miser, who had fixed his dwelling in that delicate abode, and I very well remembered, now that Mr. Gabriel Sooterkins mentioned it, that I had been the head and front of the offending, and that Ikey and himself were accomplices in the business.
An exceedingly reputable exchange of persons I had made.
“Well,” said I, “if it’s done it can’t be helped, you know, and I’m off this night,” although I had not the most remote idea of where I was going.