“They’ve caught _your_ man, you means, mum,” returned Mrs. Fokesell, shaking her head till the little bunch of vermicular ringlets at each side of her face swung backwards and forwards, like the “wings” of a kite in the wind. “My man!” ejaculated the terrified Aggy, as she began to have a vague perception that “something dreadful” had occurred to her beloved Cursty. “What in t’ warl’ do’sta mean—what do’sta mean?” “Why, it’s just this here, mum—that your good man, as you call him”—here the circumspect landlady opened the room-door mysteriously, to satisfy herself that nobody was listening, and then closing it again, advanced towards Mrs. Sandboys, and said, in a half-whisper, “your good man has been and got took up for being drunk and disorderly, and oncapable of taking care of hisself.” Mrs. Sandboys threw up her hands, and dropped into the nearest chair; while Elcy came and leant over and tried to assure her that “it must be some shocking mistake again.” But Mrs. Fokesell would not hear of such a thing; she had made most particular inquiries of the “party” below—for at first, she herself could hardly bring herself to believe that such a thorough gentleman, as Mr. Sandboys always appeared to be, could so lower hisself as to be seen intosticated in the public streets—but there couldn’t be no mistake this time, because the “party” had brought one of the “gent’s” cards with him. And when she heard Mrs. Sandboys and Elcy both sobbing at the intelligence, the landlady begged of them “not to go and take on in that manner,” for after his last voyage, Mr. Fokesell hisself—though he was as good a man as ever walked in shoe-leather, so long as he was at sea out of harm’s way—had gone and got overtook by liquor, and been skinned and robbed of everything he had, for all the world like young Mr. Sandboys was, by them painted dolls nigh the docks, and, as if that wasn’t enough to ruin her peace of mind, he must get hisself fined two pounds, or ten days imprisonment, for an assault on a policeman. Here the lady digressed into a long account of Mr. Fokesell’s failings, saying, that ever since their marriage she had never been a penny the better for his money, and that she didn’t know what would have become of her if it hadn’t been for her lodgers and the rent of a six-roomed cottage, that had been left her by her fust husband, who was an undertaker with a large connexion, but a weak, though an uncommon fine man, and who might have made her very comfortable at his death, if he had only done by her as he ought. Whereupon, wholly forgetting the object of her errand to Mrs. Sandboys, she further digressed into a narrative of the mixed qualities of Mr. Bolsh’s—her poor dear first husband’s—character. Mrs. Cursty, who had been too deeply absorbed in her own family misfortunes to listen to those of Mrs. Fokesell, at length, on recovering her self-possession, requested to be informed where Mr. Sandboys had been “picked up” previous to being taken into custody.