CHAPTER X.

Davie liberated on motion of the hon. Mr. Foldoodle-Clutched by the Serjeant-at-arms-Let loose upon the World-How to dine on three halfpence-Interior of a Lodging-house in "the Rookery"-Davie's waistcoat transmuted into gin-Gratuitous Promenade Concerts-A parting peep at Caroline Chatterton and Georgina Briggs-Davie's reception by Mackenzie M'Kay-A beneficent fire-Mr. Grunt Makbuikie—Davie's “pebbliecawtion"-the Mousetrap, and its fate

-Doesn't drown himself, but turns Lecturer and the head of Miss Letitia Savong!

WHEN the os sublime has saluted the turpe solum, when misfortune has reduced a man as low as it is possible for him to descend, when he is stretched in the dust and ready to bite it, none but the lowest class of Frenchmen are base enough to walk over him and kick him prostrate. It was well said, in allusion to the self-styled "great nation," by a great German critic, that there are two human natures, that which mankind share in common, and that which is peculiarly Gallican. The cruellest, yet, perhaps, most impotent of animals, are the monkey tribe and the feline race. The squeak and gibber of the one, the grimace and jabber of the other, are indefeasibly French,

VOL. II.

and not less so is the tormenting malignity with which all three Frenchmen, cats, and monkies-torture with a grin their fallen victims. For proof, the late affair at Boulogne, and the firing on conquered foes struggling for life in the water. For confirmation, the well-known fact that if you get into a row at any given point, from the Channel to the Mediterranean, and once have the misfortune to get down, if your nose is not kicked off, or your eye enfoncé, you have the d-l's luck and your own. There is here no question of French gentlemen, than whom, though equivocal friends to confiding husbands, there are no more gallant adversaries in the field.

The House took pity upon Davie's plight, and upon the motion of the hon. Mr. Foldoodle, my hero was ordered to be set at large. Davie was, thereupon, about to scamper off, when the serjeant-at-arms, with a smart pinch of his elbow, conducted him to the office of the speaker's clerk, for the purpose of assessing the amount of fees to be paid on the occasion of his " merciful liberation." The sum was speedily found to be precisely £9 19s. 6d. including halfa-crown per office sheet for a draught of the misreport, which Davie muttered that he "wushed to the deevil humsel'!" Davie

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happened to have his week's salary still untouched in his pocket. Two sovereigns more, and a little loose silver, were all his earthly possessions. But this amounted to no more than £8. Davie tendered the money, and pleaded his poverty as an excuse for the balance. A grim smile was the answer. Heaven bless poor Davie's simplicity! To think of getting out of the Serjeant-at-arms' clutches without paying down the last farthing extorted by legalized robbery for his "free discharge!" Davie was forced to apply for assistance to Tom Penrailway, the cause of all his misfortunes; and a collection was made in the reporters' gallery, by which the balance of £2 was soon made up. With bitter feelings of wounded Highland pride, Davie was forced to accept this humiliating assistance. Had he chosen to decline it, the clemency of the House of Commons would have probably left him rotting in its cells even longer than Stockdale.

When Davie escaped from the clutches of the serjeant-at-arms, his entire stock in trade consisted of one single sixpence.

"The world was all before him where to choose!"

Sixpence is, in itself, no very considerable sum; but still much may be done with it. Many a man, who has made a splendid fortune, began with less. Some pretty Miltonic poetry has been written about the last" splendid shilling." When I have leisure, I propose to do as much for a tester. For the present, I must confine myself to hunting upon Diddledoft's trail. Ere I part with the sixpence aforesaid, let me just observe that, however sneezed at by the opulent, it may stave off starvation for the space of three days, and has done so repeatedly in the streets of London; though the great majority of mankind are so muddle-headed as to prefer to its judicious application its phrensied outlay in the first poisonpalace they meet for six-penn'orths of gin, with the chance of dying in the kennel!

The depths of misery through which Diddledoft waded neck-deep

for the ensuing three months, will be probably incredible to West-End damsels, who have never made acquaintance with London mud, whose nights are spent in splendid dissipation, whose days in rolling from park to park upon patent elliptic springs, with their pretty little feet spurning the leopard's skin “which they scarce seem to touch." It is well to administer a lesson to human pride by permitting it at intervals to obtain a passing glance at the shifts to which it may one day be reduced of human beggary.

For three whole days, Davie, with a manly constancy, which almost redeems his numerous absurdities, limited himself for a maintenance to his own resources. His slight experience had engendered the strongest repugnance to penny-a-lining, and there was no other visible means to which he could resort for the purpose of increasing his slender store. Against writing home for money his Highland spirit rebelled. The contrast of his actual position with the splendid hopes with which he had crossed the paternal threshold was too monstrous to permit of his entertaining this notion for a moment. His disgrace at the press cut off all communication with the elder Penrailway, and for Pen the younger he entertained feelings of deep resentment. A mortified spirit" restrained him from calling at the chambers of M'Kay and O'Flaherty. The first day (like Curran, when he was in similar extremis), he dined on a whistle in the Park, and to stave off the claims of supper went early to bed. The next day he was a little extravagant, spending threepence halfpenny, which was thus laid out:-breakfast, a penny roll; dinner, ditto, with a hap'orth of periwinkles, washed down with a glass of porter. For amusements this day he had the pleasure of listening to no fewer than seventeen bands of street-music, in different parts of the town; and, as this involved no small degree of locomotion, he betook himself to bed with a sense of exquisite comfort, which is seldom shared by the downencircled rich. Next morning a circumstance occurred which may be

styled "a kick in his gallop." His landlady presented him with her bill for a fortnight's lodging, which Davie having no means of paying, and perceiving by her eye that her demand was imperative, he put on the best face he could, told her he meant to proceed forthwith to "draa his sollary" (the aspect of the bold-faced, brawny-armed virago rendered the fib indispensable), and leaving his poor "traps" to pay the rent, bolted into the street, resolved never to visit the " O Cawledonian Cawffee Hoos" again, until the problematical period of his seeing better days.

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On this, the third day, Davie emerged a houseless vagabond," with just twopence halfpenny in his pocket. During his visit to St. Giles's, in company with O'Flaherty, he had picked up a piece of experience, of which it will be presently perceived that he was not slow to avail himself. This day he contrived to dine comfortably on three-halfpence at Aldersgate pump. He had judiciously abandoned the purchasing of penny rolls a portion of metropolitan wisdom which he acquired in Paddington, where, in looking through a baker's window, he perceived an Irish labourer buying a penn'orth of coarse bread by weight. To Davie's delighted eyes was exhibited fully twice the quantity which he had been in the habit of purchasing for a penny in the jaunty roll form; and he straightway resolved to cut the genteel for the future, and take to the substantial. His dinner was very excellently provided in the following manner. A sheep's trotter, purchased in the street, for one halfpenny, salt included; a huge cut of a quartern loaf, one penny, and plenty of pumpwater for nothing! It was, in truth, a dinner fit for a king-much fitter than the mess of potted lampreys which has proved fatal to so many royal stomachs, infinitely more digestible, and more consonant with the simple plans of nature. Davie, who eat it with all the zest of a ferocious appetite, found it excellent, and as he washed it down with the last spill of pump-water caught in the palms of his hands, could not refrain from exclaiming; "Ba Juv!

et's mogneeficent! A denner for threehawpence !-Weel, in a' my boarn days!"

Davie's amusements this day consisted in watching the evolutions of the ducks and ducklings in St. James's Park, in counting the number of busses which passed the Duke of Northumberland's at Charing Cross within an hour, in reckoning the comparative aggregates of women wearing clogs, and ditto with ditto in their hands, that passed over Blackfriars and London Bridges; and finally in watching the departures and arrivals of the several steamers at the wharfs adjoining. From eight o'clock till twelve he attended the Promenade Concert at Covent Garden-not the shilling affair, but the very respectable gratuitous one under the Piazza, and he could not help admiring the wonderful arrangements of our advanced civilization, which thus provides for the delectation of the penniless. Having rummaged in his pockets to make sure of the presence of his last penny, he proceeded to Bainbridge-street, St. Giles's, nothing daunted by his recollection of the scene in which he figured at the pump, although it might have naturally served as a damper, and stopped before a dingy door, on the window adjoining which were written up these words :

"Sheck ov strow furr they nite wan peny." This intimation that the ruin before which he stood was a consumedly cheap lodging-house would have been Greek to Davie, but that O'Flaherty had explained its meaning to him during their former visit.

Davie mustered courage to enter the miserable hovel (and a courageous effort it was). A blear-eyed old crone, upwards of seventy years of age, and a half-naked girl, her face begrimed with filth, and her feet and legs incased in five days' mud, received him. The former rose from her seat for an instant, and squealed out with a horribly cracked voice, "Who's there?" then sank down in the backless, half-seatless rush-bottomed chair, on which she had been rocking to and fro at the period of Davie's entrance. She was too drunk

to stand. A short black pipe lay broken at her feet. She was too drunk to hold it between her toothless gums.

The young girl, who acted as the lodging-house Hebe, and who began to entertain sinister notions in consequence of Davie's silence, the result of bitter, conflicting feelings, here came forward and thrust the rushlight which she held in her hand, and the tallow from which streamed over her fingers, within an inch of Davie's face. The latter was frightened almost as much as disgusted, and he was on the point of making a precipitate retreat into the street, when he was checked by a consciousness that no other earthly retreat was open to him, and, furthermore, that to wander about the streets all night might prove seriously detrimental to his health, which was already beginning to be assailed with feverish symptoms. He was about to announce his want of a lodging for the night, but found himself tongue-tied.

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Vell, my covey," said the young female, "vot is it you'd be after vishin?" The girl's dialect exhibited the strange compound of Hibernian and Cockney peculiarities, which I have already mentioned as characteristic of the rising denizens of St. Giles's.

"A'm thunkin' maybe ye cud oabligate me wi' a loagin' fer the nicht."

"Can't fetch that 'ere lingo, my covey. What an omadhawn you are to kim to the Rookery with your houtlandish cheek. Dis yer mother know you're hout, ould fellow ?"

Davie made no reply, but pointed to the inscription on the window. The girl of course comprehended the pantomime at once, and saying, "Vell, japers, you're a dasintish sort of lookink prig, any how, so you're welcome to the shake o' strow. But tip us the pinny, d'ye mind, afore you goes up." Davie gave her his last coin.

"If you've ony more o' them 'ere," said the girl, with a knowing wink, "you'd better keep a sharp look hout, ould boy, for there's 'em above as would aise you of 'em vile you'd be a-sayink Jack Ro inson."

So saying, she lighted Davie up a broken ladder leading to the loft over head, on which Davie saw from twenty to thirty human bodies, in every variety of statuesque drapery (a close approximation to classical nudity included). The floor was thinly sprinkled with straw; males and females, young and old, were indiscriminately huddled together, and stretched without any regard to uniformity, heads and points, the feet of one denizen reposing on the shoulders of another, the arms of a third flung back in unquiet dreams on the legs of a fourth, and so of the rest. The girl pointed silently to an unoccupied corner, and the candle having now burned down to her fingers and forced her to let it drop in the middle of the straw, she jumped upon it with her naked feet, like a wild bacchante, to prevent a conflagration, and retired with a laugh at the conclusion of the exercise, leaving Davie to compose himself to rest as well as he could in the dark.

Diddledoft at first endeavoured to subdue his bitter feelings, and fall asleep without removing any portion of his clothes. But this was impossible. The exhalations from so many human bodies of the lowest order, intermixed with the noxious fumes of vile gin, tobacco, and porter, rendered the atmosphere intolerable. He was forced to take off his coat and waistcoat, and found no spot on which he could lay them, but the bodies of a bricklayer's labourer and an applewoman, by one of which he was bounded on the N. N. W., and by the other on the S. E Reflecting on his bitter lot, he could have cried salt tears, but there was a rugged doggedness in his nature which was proof even against this extremity. Strange infatuation of self-deluded humanity-high hopes of future literary renown still sustained him, and he was eclipsing Burns and Scott in imagination, when he fell fast asleep!

It was broad day-light when he awoke, and the chamber was entirely tenantless. Nothing but the tossed straw, which exhaled no very dulcet odours, was visible. At some distance from him his coat lay stretched, but his waistcoat was nowhere to be