In my way there was not a rascal I met but seemed to my heated imagination to know my misfortunes, and enjoy, with sly satisfaction, their fearful consummation. Two fellows I cut smartly across the cheek; they were standing coolly by the wayside, with their hands in their pockets, interchanging winks, and thrusting their tongues provokingly out like hounds on a hot day. They did not relish the taste of my thong, and one of them made an awkward squelsh into a ditch on receipt, head over heels, immensely to my heart’s content.
It was evening when I reached the little village where my head-quarters for some weeks had been established. To add to my miseries, I found that Tom had, in my absence, with his usual volatility of temperament, been entertaining a numerous party in the Cross Keys, on the faith of my accession of property. When I rode past the tavern, my ears were assailed with most extraordinary sounds of festivity, and my head endangered by a shower of bottles and glasses that his reckless boon companions were discharging from the windows. Some of these windows, too, were illuminated with multitudes of dips—the extravagant dog!—three to the pound. And some coarse transparencies were flaunting in my face pithy sentences, such as—“A Glorious Revolution,” “Splendid Victory,” “Jubilee to Hopeless Creditors,” “Intelligence Extraordinary!!” &c. Then, at every pause of the maddening din, the explosion of another bottle of champagne smote my ear like a death-knell. Cork after cork popped against the ceiling—crack, crack, they went like a running fire along a line of infantry, while loud above the storm rose the vociferations of my jolly friend, as he cheered them on to another bumper, with all the honours, or volunteered his own song. Poor Tom, he had only one song, which he wrote himself, and never failed to sing to the deafening of every one when he was drunk. It was never printed, and here you have as much of it as I remember, to vary the melancholy texture of my story:—
SONG.
Fill a can, let us drink,
For ’tis nonsense to think
Of the cares that may come with to-morrow;
And ’tis folly as big
As the Chancellor’s wig,
To dash present joy with dull sorrow.
Hip! hip! hip! fill away;