"Ah, yes; if e'er in future hours,
When we this bill have all forgot,
They send it in again! ye powers!
And swear that we have paid it not;
How sweet to know, on such a day,
We've never cast receipts away!"
The following is one of the pen-and-ink portraits that have found their way into the "Drawer." The sitter was a subject of our own Gotham.
"He was a Scotchman by birth, and had, without exception, the ugliest face I ever saw on a man's shoulders, or a monkey's either, for that matter. But by a perversity of taste, not unusual in the world, the man made a complete hobby of his 'mug,' homely as it was; and was full of the conceit that on fit occasions he could summon to it a look of terrible and dignified sarcasm, that was more efficacious than words or blows. He was rather insolent in his deportment, and was consequently continually getting into scrapes with some one or other, in which he invariably got the worst of it; because instead of lifting his hand, and giving blow for blow, he always trusted to the efficacy of his look. His various little mishaps he used to relate to his fellow-boarders at meal-times, always concluding his narrations with, 'But didn't I give the dirty rapscallions one o' my looks?' And then twisting his 'ugly mug' into a shape impossible to be described, he fancied he had convinced his hearers that his antagonists, whoever they were, would be in no hurry to meddle with him again!
"The last time I saw him, he was giving an account of an insult he had received the night before at some porter-house in the neighborhood, where a little fellow, who was a perfect stranger to him, had insisted upon drinking at his expense, and who, when he refused to pay for the liquor, had not only abused him most shamefully with his tongue, but had actually kicked him.
"'Kick you!' exclaimed a fellow-boarder.
"'Yes!' said he, growing warm with the recital; 'he kicked me here!' and he laid his hand on that portion of his valorous person that had come in contact with the stranger's boot.
"'And what did you say to that?' asked a second listener.
"'What did I say to it?' he replied, as if astonished that any body should be ignorant of his invariable rejoinder to similar assaults. 'What did I say? I said nothing at all. The kick was but a soft one, and the fellow that gave it a wee bit of a 'jink-ma-doddy,' that I could have throttled with one hand on the spot. But I just contented myself with giving him one of my looks!'
"Here Sawney 'defined his position' to the company, by giving them one of his awful glances. But this time he managed to convey an expression of ugliness and comicality so far beyond any thing he had ever called up before, that the inference was irresistible that the kick he had received must have been a good deal harder than he was willing to acknowledge."