Many things fall between the cup and the lip!

Your man does please me

With his conceit.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Comes Chanon Hugh accoutred as you see

Disguised!

And thus am I to gull the constable?

Now have among you for a man at arms.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

High-constable was more, though

He laid Dick Tator by the heels.

BEN JONSON— Tale of a Tub.

Meanwhile Clifford strode rapidly through the streets which surrounded the judge’s house, and turning to an obscurer quartier of the town, entered a gloomy lane or alley. Here he was abruptly accosted by a man wrapped in a shaggy great-coat, of somewhat a suspicious appearance.

“Aha, Captain!” said he, “you are beyond your time, but all ‘s well!”

Attempting, with indifferent success, the easy self-possession which generally marked his address to his companions, Clifford, repeating the stranger’s words, replied —

“All’s well! What! are the prisoners released?”

“No, faith!” answered the man, with a rough laugh, “not yet; but all in good time. It is a little too much to expect the justices to do our work, though, by the Lord Harry, we often do theirs!”

“What then?” asked Clifford, impatiently.

“Why, the poor fellows had been carried to the town of ——— and brought before the queer cuffin (Magistrate) ere I arrived, though I set off the moment you told me, and did the journey in four hours. The examination lasted all yesterday, and they were remanded till today — let’s see, it is not yet noon; we may be there before it’s over.”

“And this is what you call well!” said Clifford, angrily. “No, Captain, don’t be glimflashy! You have not heard all yet! It seems that the only thing buffed hard against them was by a stout grazier, who was cried ‘Stand!’ to, some fifty miles off the town; so the queer coffin thinks of sending the poor fellows to the jail of the county where they did the business!”

“Ah! that may leave some hopes for them! We must look sharp to their journey; if they once get to prison, their only chances are the file and the bribe. Unhappily, neither of them is so lucky as myself at that trade!”

“No, indeed, there is not a stone-wall in England that the great Captain Lovett could not creep through, I’ll swear!” said the admiring satellite.

“Saddle the horses and load the pistols! I will join you in ten minutes. Have my farmer’s dress ready, the false hair, etc. Choose your own trim. Make haste; the Three Feathers is the house of meeting.”

“And in ten minutes only, Captain?”

“Punctually!”

The stranger turned a corner and was out of sight. Clifford, muttering, “Yes, I was the cause of their apprehension; it was I who was sought; it is but fair that I should strike a blow for their escape before I attempt my own,” continued his course till he came to the door of a public-house. The sign of a seaman swung aloft, portraying the jolly tar with a fine pewter pot in his hand, considerably huger than his own circumference. An immense pug sat at the door, lolling its tongue out, as if, having stuffed itself to the tongue, it was forced to turn that useful member out of its proper place. The shutters were half closed, but the sounds of coarse merriment issued jovially forth.

Clifford disconcerted the pug; and crossing the threshold, cried in aloud tone, “Janseen!”

“Here!” answered a gruff voice; and Clifford, passing on, came to a small parlour adjoining the tap. There, seated by a round oak table, he found mine host — a red, fierce, weather-beaten, but bloated-looking personage, like Dick Hatteraick in a dropsy.

“How now, Captain!” cried he, in a gutteral accent, and interlarding his discourse with certain Dutch graces, which with our reader’s leave we will omit, as being unable to spell them; “how now! — not gone yet!”

“No! I start for the coast tomorrow; business keeps me today. I came to ask if Mellon may be fully depended on?”

“Ay, honest to the back-bone.”

“And you are sure that in spite of my late delays he will not have left the village?”

“Sure! What else can I be? Don’t I know Jack Mellon these twenty years! He would lie like a log in a calm for ten months together, without moving a hair’s-breadth, if he was under orders.”

“And his vessel is swift and well manned, in case of an officer’s chase?”

“The ‘Black Molly’ swift? Ask your grandmother. The ‘Black Molly’ would outstrip a shark.”

“Then good-by, Janseen; there is something to keep your pipe alight. We shall not meet within the three seas again, I think. England is as much too hot for me as Holland for you!”

“You are a capital fellow!” cried mine host, shaking Clifford by the hand; “and when the lads come to know their loss, they will know they have lost the bravest and truest gill that ever took to the toby; so good-by, and be d —— d to you!”

With this valedictory benediction mine host released Clifford; and the robber hastened to his appointment at the Three Feathers.

He found all prepared. He hastily put on his disguise; and his follower led out his horse — a noble animal of the grand Irish breed, of remarkable strength and bone, and save only that it was somewhat sharp in the quarters (a fault which they who look for speed as well as grace will easily forgive), of most unequalled beauty in its symmetry and proportions.

Well did the courser know, and proudly did it render obeisance to, its master; snorting impatiently and rearing from the hand of the attendant robber, the sagacious animal freed itself of the rein, and as it tossed its long mane in the breeze of the fresh air, came trotting to the place where Clifford stood.

“So ho, Robin! so ho! What, thou chafest that I have left thy fellow behind at the Red Cave! Him we may never see more. But while I have life, I will not leave thee, Robin!” With these words the robber fondly stroked the shining neck of his favourite steed; and as the animal returned the caress by rubbing its head against the hands and the athletic breast of its master, Clifford felt at his heart somewhat of that old racy stir of the blood which had been once to him the chief charm of his criminal profession, and which in the late change of his feelings he had almost forgotten.

“Well, Robin, well,” he renewed, as he kissed the face of his steed — “well, we will have some days like our old ones yet; thou shalt say, Ha! ha! to the trumpet, and bear thy master along on more glorious enterprises than he has yet thanked thee for sharing. Thou wilt now be my only familiar, my only friend, Robin; we two shall be strangers in a foreign land. But thou wilt make thyself welcome easier than thy lord, Robin; and thou wilt forget the old days and thine old comrades and thine old loves, when — Ha!” and Clifford turned abruptly to his attendant, who addressed him; “It is late, you say. True! Look you, it will be unwise for us both to quit London together. You know the sixth milestone; join me there, and we can proceed in company!”

Not unwilling to linger for a parting cup, the comrade assented to the prudence of the plan proposed; and after one or two additional words of caution and advice, Clifford mounted and rode from the yard of the inn. As he passed through the tall wooden gates into the street, the imperfect gleam of the wintry sun falling over himself and his steed, it was scarcely possible, even in spite of his disguise and rude garb, to conceive a more gallant and striking specimen of the lawless and daring tribe to which he belonged; the height, strength, beauty, and exquisite grooming visible in the steed; the sparkling eye, the bold profile, the sinewy chest, the graceful limbs, and the careless and practised horsemanship of the rider.

Looking after his chief with a long and an admiring gaze, the robber said to the hostler of the inn, an aged and withered man, who had seen nine generations of highwaymen rise and vanish —

“There, Joe, when did you ever look on a hero like that? The bravest heart, the frankest hand, the best judge of a horse, and the handsomest man that ever did honour to Hounslow!”

“For all that,” returned the hostler, shaking his palsied head, and turning back to the tap-room — “for all that, master, his time be up. Mark my whids, Captain Lovett will not be over the year — no, nor mayhap the month!”

“Why, you old rascal, what makes you so wise? You will not peach, I suppose!”

“I peach! Devil a bit! But there never was the gemman of the road, great or small, knowing or stupid, as outlived his seventh year. And this will be the captain’s seventh, come the 21st of next month; but he be a fine chap, and I’ll go to his hanging!”

“Fish!” said the robber, peevishly — he himself was verging towards the end of his sixth year — “pish!”

“Mind, I tells it you, master; and somehow or other I thinks — and I has experience in these things — by the fey, of his eye and the drop of his lip, that the captain’s time will be up today!”

[Fey — A word difficult to translate; but the closest interpretation of which is, perhaps, “the ill omen.”]

Here the robber lost all patience, and pushing the hoary boder of evil against the wall, he turned on his heel, and sought some more agreeable companion to share his stirrup-cup.

It was in the morning of the day following that in which the above conversations occurred, that the sagacious Augustus Tomlinson and the valorous Edward Pepper, handcuffed and fettered, were jogging along the road in a postchaise, with Mr. Nabbem squeezed in by the side of the former, and two other gentlemen in Mr. Nabbem’s confidence mounted on the box of the chaise, and interfering sadly, as Long Ned growlingly remarked, with “the beauty of the prospect.”

“Ah, well!” quoth Nabbem, unavoidably thrusting his elbow into Tomlinson’s side, while he drew out his snuffbox, and helped himself largely to the intoxicating dust; “you had best prepare yourself, Mr. Pepper, for a change of prospects. I believes as how there is little to please you in guod [prison].”

“Nothing makes men so facetious as misfortune to others!” said Augustus, moralizing, and turning himself, as well as he was able, in order to deliver his body from the pointed elbow of Mr. Nabbem. “When a man is down in the world, all the bystanders, very dull fellows before, suddenly become wits!”

“You reflects on I,” said Mr. Nabbem. “Well, it does not sinnify a pin; for directly we does our duty, you chaps become howdaciously ungrateful!”

“Ungrateful!” said Pepper; “what a plague have we got to be grateful for? I suppose you think we ought to tell you you are the best friend we have, because you have scrouged us, neck and crop, into this horrible hole, like turkeys fatted for Christmas. ‘Sdeath! one’s hair is flatted down like a pancake; and as for one’s legs, you had better cut them off at once than tuck them up in a place a foot square — to say nothing of these blackguardly irons!”

“The only irons pardonable in your eyes, Ned,” said Tomlinson, “are the curling-irons, eh?”

“Now, if this is not too much!” cried Nabbem, crossly; “you objects to go in a cart like the rest of your profession; and when I puts myself out of the way to obleedgie you with a shay, you slangs I for it!”

“Peace, good Nabbem!” said Augustus, with a sage’s dignity; “you must allow a little bad humour in men so unhappily situated as we are.”

The soft answer turneth away wrath. Tomlinson’s answer softened Nabbem; and by way of conciliation, he held his snuff-box to the nose of his unfortunate prisoner. Shutting his eyes, Tomlinson long and earnestly sniffed up the luxury, and as soon as, with his own kerchief of spotted yellow, the officer had wiped from the proboscis some lingering grains, Tomlinson thus spoke:

“You see us now, Mr. Nabbem, in a state of broken-down opposition; but our spirits are not broken too. In our time we have had something to do with the administration; and our comfort at present is the comfort of fallen ministers!”

“Oho! you were in the Methodist line before you took to the road?” said Nabbem.

“Not so!” answered Augustus, gravely. “We were the Methodists of politics, not of the church; namely, we lived upon our flock without a legal authority to do so, and that which the law withheld from us our wits gave. But tell me, Mr. Nabbem, are you addicted to politics?”

“Why, they says I be,” said Mr. Nabbem, with a grin; “and for my part, I thinks all who sarves the king should stand up for him, and take care of their little families!”

“You speak what others think!” answered Tomlinson, smiling also. “And I will now, since you like politics, point out to you what I dare say you have not observed before.”

“What be that?” said Nabbem.

“A wonderful likeness between the life of the gentlemen adorning his Majesty’s senate and the life of the gentlemen whom you are conducting to his Majesty’s jail.”
The Libellous Parallel of Augustus Tomlinson.

“We enter our career, Mr. Nabbem, as your embryo ministers enter parliament — by bribery and corruption. There is this difference, indeed, between the two cases: we are enticed to enter by the bribery and corruptions of others; they enter spontaneously by dint of their own. At first, deluded by romantic visions, we like the glory of our career better than the profit, and in our youthful generosity we profess to attack the rich solely from consideration for the poor! By and by, as we grow more hardened, we laugh at these boyish dreams — peasant or prince fares equally at our impartial hands; we grasp at the bucket, but we scorn not the thimbleful; we use the word ‘glory’ only as a trap for proselytes and apprentices; our fingers, like an office-door, are open for all that can possibly come into them; we consider the wealthy as our salary, the poor as our perquisites. What is this, but a picture of your member of ............