"'Fact, sir! I gave ten guineas for it! I thought, also, to have obtained the night-cap in which he slept the night before his execution, but another collector was beforehand with me, and bribed the turnkey to steal it for him.'
"'I had no idea,' I said, 'that there could be any competition for such an article.'
"'Ah, sir!' said he, with a deep sigh, 'you don't know the value of these interesting relics. I have been upward of thirty years a collector of them. When a man devotes himself to a great object, he must go to it heart and soul. I have spared neither time nor money in my pursuit; and since I became a collector I have attended the execution of every noted malefactor throughout the kingdom.'
"Perceiving that my attention was drawn to a common rope which served as a bell-pull, he said to me:
"'I see you are remarking my bell-cord; that is the identical rope, sir, which hanged Bellingham, who murdered Mr. Perceval in the House of Commons. I offered any sum for the one in which Thistlewood ended his life, to match it, but I was disappointed.... The Whigs, sir, have swept away all our good old English customs, and deprived us of our national recreations. I remember, sir, when Monday was called 'hanging-day' at the Old Bailey; on that morning a man might be certain of seeing three or four criminals swung off before breakfast.'"
The criminal curiosity-hunter now takes his friend into an adjoining room, where he shows him his general museum of curiosities, comprising relics of every grade of crime, from murder to petty larceny; among them a door-mat made of oakum picked by a "lady"-culprit while in the penitentiary; a short clay-pipe, once in the possession of Burke, the wholesale murderer; and the fork belonging to the knife with which some German had cut his wife's and children's throats!
"Misery," it is said, "loves company." What a juvenile "company," when the last thaw came—(and so many came, after what was supposed to be the last snow, this season, that it would be difficult to count them)—what a juvenile company, we say, there was, to lament with the skate-vender who poured out his griefs in the following affecting parody upon the late Thomas Moore's lines, "I never loved a dear gazelle," &c.:
"I never wrote up 'Skates to sell,'
Trusting to fickle Nature's law,
But—when I advertised them well,
And puffed them—it was sure to thaw.
Yes; it was ever thus—the Fates
Seem adverse to the trade in skates.
"If a large lot I chanced to buy,
Thinking 'twas likely still to freeze
Up the thermometer would fly,
All in a day, some ten degrees.
Their presence in my window-pane,
Turns ice to mud, and snow to rain."